A reminder to all tax publishers – tomorrow's the day

GDS & HMRC – what could possibly go wrong?

Good question ...

... which should be answered tomorrow, 9 December 2013, the day of the workshop round at GDS Towers, where tax publishers are invited to a briefing on GOV.UK:

We would like to invite all tax publishers to attend a briefing on GOV.UK. There will be an opportunity for questions on the day and if there is a need we can arrange follow up meetings on a later date. The workshop will be held on Monday 9 December from 1.30pm to 3.30pm at Aviation House. If you would like to attend, please contact the HMRC transition team.

The purpose of this transition is apparently to provide APIs (applications program interfaces) to HMRC's manuals.

What can the tax publishers look forward to seeing tomorrow?

Perhaps an API that calculates the optimal group relief for a typical group of, say, 100 companies? An API that takes into account the fact that several of these companies have different year-ends? Some were sold during the year and others acquired during the year? Some own subsidiaries overseas? With different accounting currencies? The optimal group relief this year may require the amended returns for previous years to be re-submitted? The API will do all this for you and direct debit the taxpayer's bank account to pay the tax due?

Easy stuff. Anyone can do it. Certainly the "elite team of digital experts" at GDS should have no problem.

Harder by far is to get the language right.

Did someone just write "re-submitted"? Oh dear. As GDS tell us:

Plain English is mandatory for all of GOV.UK. This means we don’t use formal or long words when easy or short ones will do. For example, we normally talk about sending something ... rather than ‘submitting’ it ...

Oddly enough, despite the word "submit" being so formal and long, it does actually occur on GOV.UK several hundred times, please see the GOV.UK example below. It is just possible that, on this occasion, what GDS said is false and that this is an occasion on which the formal and long word "poppycock" could properly be used.

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• HSMP Applications submitted over the past 12 months

  • Published on: 1 December 2005
  • FOI release
  • Departments: Home Office
  We have received a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requesting information on the number of HSMP applications submitted over…
  

• Visa applications submitted to Public Enquiry Office

  • Published on: 31 October 2013
  • FOI release
  • Departments: Home Office
  General visa applications submitted to Public Enquiry Office from October 2012 to March 2013.
  

• HSMP Applications submitted over the past 12 months

  • Published on: 1 December 2005
  • FOI release
  • Departments: Home Office
  Date: Thu Dec 01 14:02:25 GMT 2005 Full Document HSMP Applications submitted over the past 12 months (Microsoft Excel file - 32kb)
  

• List of installations submitted to the EC: approval to be excluded

  • Published on: 7 August 2012
  • Policy paper
  • Departments: DECC
  List of installations submitted to the European Commission for approval to be excluded from the Small Emitter and Hospital Opt-out Scheme.
  

• DBS FOI 1039: Employer applications submitted

  • Published on: 14 May 2013
  • FOI release
  • Departments: DBS
  The FOI 1039 is requesting the number of applications submitted by each employers name in the 12 month period ending September 2012.
  

• Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board

  The home of Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board on GOV.UK. We provide impartial scrutiny and advice on the suitability of the Funded Decommissioning Programme (FDP), submitted by operators of new nuclear power stations. The Board advises the Secretary of State on the...
  
  • What we do
  • Policies
  • Contact details
  • Ministers

• The processing time of FLR (O) applications with biometrics submitted in August 2012

  • Published on: 23 October 2013
  • FOI release
  • Departments: Home Office
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A reminder to all tax publishers – tomorrow's the day

GDS & HMRC – what could possibly go wrong?

Good question ...

... which should be answered tomorrow, 9 December 2013, the day of the workshop round at GDS Towers, where tax publishers are invited to a briefing on GOV.UK:

We would like to invite all tax publishers to attend a briefing on GOV.UK. There will be an opportunity for questions on the day and if there is a need we can arrange follow up meetings on a later date. The workshop will be held on Monday 9 December from 1.30pm to 3.30pm at Aviation House. If you would like to attend, please contact the HMRC transition team.

The purpose of this transition is apparently to provide APIs (applications program interfaces) to HMRC's manuals.

What can the tax publishers look forward to seeing tomorrow?

The weekly diary that's full of omissions

GDS, the Government Digital Service, published their weekly diary yesterday.

Two items.

One about what their colleagues in Canada are up to. "They are doing something very similar", says Sarah Richards, in connection with GOV.UK, "it’s just like having a GDS ..., but on the other side of the water". No sooner is that clear than she adds "they do things quite differently over there and some of their processes are different".

Identical-but-quite-different is the theme of the other item, too, about the Digital Services Store.

The Store offers "all the services you would need for transformation of your online service, everything from development services, through to design, user research and system administration". It is "open to the whole public sector and it allows buyers to find suppliers with specific capabilities to help them build digital services that are Digital by Default".

Sound familiar? "The CloudStore will be the catalogue of services and suppliers on the G-Cloud Framework and we've been working on designing it for the past couple of weeks. The aim is to make it into a type of “e-marketplace” which contains details of the services, accreditation levels and enable buyers to make comparisons between services to facilitate intelligent and efficient purchasing for buyers and suppliers."

That's what we learned on 6 February 2012, 19 22 months ago.

Since then, 4 May 2013, we have lived under Cloud First: "Central government departments are now mandated to consider public cloud first in any IT procurement and the wider public sector is strongly recommended to take the same approach. In practice this means that when considering procurement of new or existing services, public organisations must have considered and fully evaluated potential cloud solutions before they consider any other option".

Why we now have a Digital Services store as well as CloudStore is a mystery. Something to do with the Canadians?

Fascinating move by Google into Brazilian education sector http://t.co/vagOXf2Kec Thanks to @davemcclure http://t.co/2ccahrr092 — Mike Bracken (@MTBracken) December 3, 2013

No room in the diary to welcome Dan Bates, the midata refugee from BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.

Nothing about GDS's new Universal Credit rôle.

And still no news about the identity assurance project, on which digital-by-default depends. Including midata and Universal Credit. Not to mention individual electoral registration.

First promised for autumn 2012, the word now is that we might see signs of life in the spring of 2014 emanating from the HMRC trial that was meant to be completed in October 2013.

But then identity assurance was also meant to be "fully operational" by March 2013. To avoid any more disappointment, just assume that the project is dead.

Is ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, chief executive of GDS and senior responsible owner of the pan-government identity assurance programme, devoting too much thought to education in Brazil becoming digital-by-default thanks to Google?

Or is he warning us that Google is the solution to his identity assurance problems?

Google know all about us. They record our web browsing. They provide our email. They've got a huge cloud services operation. Many of us log into our bank accounts using their web browser. Soon we'll be wearing their glasses. And maybe being driven by their cars. They could translate that into PDSs for all, personal data stores, for natural people persons and for legal persons. They're beefing up security on their networks, providing end-to-end encryption, in response to Edward Snowden's NSA and GCHQ revelations – they could provide the "identity hub" that has so far eluded GDS.

There would be privacy problems. Google's business model depends on selling our personal data to the highest bidder as many organisations as possible. They've made a fortune out of it. GDS have promised to consider the privacy rules by which digital-by-default should be bound but the result of their deliberations is unknown.

Certainly there's nothing about privacy in the weekly diary.

GDS might be prepared to tolerate Google's personal data practices. They might get Francis Maude to make another one of his speeches and charm us all into the belief that it is our social duty to share all our personal data. And Mr Maude might call on Stephan Shakespeare to help to get us all to "embrace the change".

Three of the original "identity providers" have already pulled out. For the remaining five, their exclusivity period (20 months?) must nearly be up. And nothing to show for all their work. Enter Google. Problem solved. At a stroke.

GDS probably won't make a diary entry about this revolutionary Google decision. But don't be surprised if it happens.

The weekly diary that's full of omissions

GDS, the Government Digital Service, published their weekly diary yesterday.

Two items.

One about what their colleagues in Canada are up to. "They are doing something very similar", says Sarah Richards, in connection with GOV.UK, "it’s just like having a GDS ..., but on the other side of the water". No sooner is that clear than she adds "they do things quite differently over there and some of their processes are different".

Identical-but-quite-different is the theme of the other item, too, about the Digital Services Store.

BIS now Dan Batesless

17 November 2013 – midata kickstarts a collective inflection point in business:

"Hi I’m Dan, Director of the midata Innovation Lab, part of the midata voluntary [?] programme. I wanted take this opportunity to share my vision for the lab, or mIL as we call it", Dan Bates told us on 23 May 2013 when he was still Working with business to fan the flames of innovation. (He's left now.)

Dan Bates used to work for BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. We knew he'd gone. But where?

	@DanJBates hope you enjoyed your 1st day @gdsteam #midata look 4ward to continued collaboration on how to empower consumers with their data — Gemma Lobb (midata) (@BISmidata) December 3, 2013
	@BISmidata so #midatalab apps show #midata opportunity more powerful with gov data. Day 1 @gdsteam very enjoyable. — DanBates (@DanJBates) December 3, 2013

(You may remember Gemma Lobb, see tweets above.)

Which of the following options – 1, 2, 3, or 4 – do you think is most incontrovertibly true? midata is all about:

1. Empowering the consumer
2. Improving people's lifestyles
3. Expanding the UK economy
4. GDS's identity assurance programme (GDS is the Government Digital Service, prop: ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, see tweets above)

BIS now Dan Batesless

17 November 2013 – midata kickstarts a collective inflection point in business:

"Hi I’m Dan, Director of the midata Innovation Lab, part of the midata voluntary [?] programme. I wanted take this opportunity to share my vision for the lab, or mIL as we call it", Dan Bates told us on 23 May 2013 when he was still Working with business to fan the flames of innovation. (He's left now.)

Dan Bates used to work for BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. We knew he'd gone. But where?

Curtains for midata

Tom Loosemore is "not 'appy. Not 'appy at all"

It was two years ago, 3 November 2011, that Ed Davey when he was still at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) told the world about midata: "Today’s announcement marks the first time globally there has been such a Government-backed initiative to empower individuals with so much control over the use of their own data".

That data could form the basis for a new industry. Ctrl-Shift, the consultants advising BIS, told us that "access to such data represents a ‘holy grail’ data to companies because it explains why people do what they do and predicts what they are going to do next".

There was a perfunctory consultation and BIS issued a press release listing 10 ways that apps in a midata future could shape our choices, including this: "So where your favourite restaurant has deals or offers, you could be alerted in advance to take advantage and make a booking. Combined with other services, the programme could also indicate where you could save money or improve your health by eating elsewhere, drinking less or going out less".

The voluntary midata scheme became the statutory midata scheme when the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 was passed, including the Supply of Customer Data clauses 89-91: "The Secretary of State may by regulations require a regulated person to provide customer data (a) to a customer, at the customer’s request; (b) to a person who is authorised by a customer to receive the data, at the customer’s request or, if the regulations so provide, at the authorised person’s request" etc ...

Then the midata Innovation Lab (mIL) was set up with 22 Founding Partners including the likes of the BBC, Which?, Ofgem and nPower. "Hi I’m Dan, Director of the midata Innovation Lab, part of the midata voluntary programme", said Dan Bates, who was Working with business to fan the flames of innovation, "... we will help empower UK consumers in a really meaningful way ...".

That was May 2013, six months ago, and since then the mIL has been beavering away producing apps to demonstrate the incontrovertible value of midata and as we saw in midata kickstarts a collective inflection point in business they've produced five of them.

Five Prototype apps – MI Energy, MI Finance, MI Relative Calm, MI Health and MI Move.

Five.

Do you know how many apps there are in the world?

Let's narrow that down a bit.

Do you know how many Android apps there are in Google's Play store?

According to a 24 July 2013 article on PhoneArena.com, Android's Google Play beats App Store with over 1 million apps, now officially largest: "Android's Google Play store has just officially reached over 1 million apps and it is now finally outgrown the Apple App Store and its 900 000 applications".

Take a quick look at Apple's iTunes App Store and the apps on Google play and on Microsoft's Windows Phone store. Then go back and have another look at mIL's five apps.

They're just me-toos.

There's no innovation.

There's a thriving and dodgy apps industry out there already, mIL can't hold a candle to it and why should it even try? The whole exercise was predictably fatuous and now BIS have proved it.

(What's the difference between downloading an app and downloading a virus? Answers on a postcard, please.)

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt has recorded a short video saying that mIL's five prototype apps allow us to "get to the future more quickly". It may help to explain that he is the chairman of the midata programme. And chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute.

You may agree that he is just putting a brave face on failure.

But that doesn't matter.

Your opinion doesn't count.

BIS will do what it wants and the devil take the evidence. Craig Belsham, who "heads up" the midata programme at BIS, warns us on his blog that: "We have learnt a lot but there is still much to do to ensure midata reaches mass market appeal. Please do look at the apps and read the report and share any thoughts you may have ... And please come back here and follow us on twitter for updates on a possible next stage for the midata Innovation Lab".

But there is potentially an effective impediment to a next stage for mIL.

Cast your mind back to a post by Tom Loosemore, the deputy director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), 12 March 2013, We’re not ‘appy. Not ‘appy at all.:

The points we’ll be making to anyone in central government wanting permission to start work on a mobile apps are: - government’s position is that native and hybrid apps are rarely justified - make sure your service meets the Digital by Default Service Standard and it will work well on mobile devices (responsive HTML5) - make your data and/or API available for re-use and you will stimulate the market if there is demand for native apps The 5 questions civil servants should ask before contemplating asking for an exemption are: 1. Is our web service already designed to be responsive to different screen sizes? If not, why not? 2. What is the user need that only a native/hybrid app can meet? 3. Are there existing native/hybrid apps which already meet this user need? 4.. Is our service available to 3rd parties via an API or open data? If not, why not? 5. Does meeting this need justify the lifetime cost of a native or hybrid app? We are not ‘banning’ apps outright. For example, the NHS-funded ‘Change 4 Life’ healthy lifestyle apps rely on a persistent 24/7 presence on users’ mobiles to try to persuade people to eat and drink more healthily. But we are backing open standards, in this case the Web ...

GDS don't want apps. BIS will have displeased GDS by having mIL develop apps. And what happens when you displease GDS? They "route round" you. That's curtains for midata.

----------

Updated 12:01

Among other apps, mIL have developed MI Move. You can't buy MI Move. It doesn't exist. It's not a product on the market. On the other hand, you can buy Moving Planner from the Google play store. For 63p:

Moving Planner is a "configurable moving planner with everything needed to plan your house moving. Save all the time typing the moving list as it comes pre-populated with more than 210 house moving related items. Easy and very intuitive thumb friendly check/uncheck options.

"For just $2 more, you can also get "Ultimate Checklist" that includes 52+ occasions and 12,000+ items including moving and lot more".

You might do better to make a list using pencil and paper.

Why do we need primary legislation and a midata unit at BIS and a knighted IT professor to nearly but not quite reproduce what the market has already provided? How will that make the economy grow?

Suppose that mIL or whoever manage one day to turn MI Move into a product:

• What control would you have over your data if you give permission for MI Move to process it?
• What reason would you have to trust the suppliers of MI Move with your data?
• Once you've downloaded MI Move onto your phone or whatever, what other data of yours would the app be able to access and transmit back to who knows whom?

Update 18:14

Among other apps, mIL have developed MI Health, which allows you to monitor your weight and your blood pressure. And to share your supermarket bills with your GP.

"Is there any equivalent app available on Apple's app store?"

Funny you should ask but, for 69p, you can buy iBP Blood Pressure by Leading Edge Apps LLC:

It's not obvious that this app will give your GP access to your shopping habits.

But then it's not obvious that your GP has time to read the Sainsbury's till roll. Nor that he or she can tell by reading it which items you ate and which were consumed by the dinner party guests last Saturday.

What benefit do you acquire by using MI Health or iBP Blood Pressure?

The answer is, again, not obvious.

The suppliers of the apps, on the other hand, may earn more than 69p from the relationship.

According to the Financial Times (FT), "an investigation earlier this summer of 43 popular health and fitness apps conducted by advocacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found “considerable privacy risks” not described in the app privacy policies ... “Consumers should not assume any of their data are private in the mobile app environment – even health data that they consider sensitive,” the report stated ... Exclusive research conducted for the Financial Times by Evidon, a web analytics and privacy group, found that the top 20 most visited apps transmit information to a web of nearly 70 companies".

There is no suggestion that iBP Blood Pressure is one of the apps included in the FT investigation, nor that Leading Edge Apps LLC is one of the suppliers, but some suppliers in the industry (we customers can't tell which) are selling their customers' data to organisations who use it for targeting advertisements or other purposes and that is not, in general, what we think we have contracted for.

The midata vision of consumer empowerment. That was the title of the BIS press release, back in the Ed Davey days, November 2011. But who is the consumer who is being empowered? The person with the weight/blood pressure problem paying 69p? Or the marketeer/insurer paying for their data?


Update 3.12.13:

	Now @Marthalanefox and @MTBracken have created conditions to address that deeprooted problem http://t.co/cQZE85ZKk4 #iNetwork #Mydex — williamheath (@williamheath) December 3, 2013
	@williamheath @Marthalanefox @MTBracken... or have they? Where is IDA? And what of trust? http://t.co/ieR8xuma1O — David Moss (@DMossEsq) December 3, 2013
	Great read MT @williamheath: @Marthalanefox & @gdsteam created conditions to address that deeprooted problem http://t.co/0Tc9zdu8TZ #Mydex — Mike Bracken (@MTBracken) December 3, 2013

Updated 4 February 2014:

You know that bit in the post above about "(What's the difference between downloading an app and downloading a virus? Answers on a postcard, please.)"? Well, no postcards received, but someone did trip over this article:

92% of Top 500 Android Apps Carry Security or Privacy Risk 27 January 2014 About 460 of the top 500 Android applications create a security or privacy risk when downloaded to Android devices, according to new research. And that’s largely because of a lack of user education, and the fact that mobile users don’t mind sharing personal information for free apps in return. MetaIntell, a vendor that specializes in cloud-based mobile risk management (MRM), set about testing the top apps in a range of stores, including Amazon, CNET, GETJAR and the official Google Play store. It found that more than 92% of the applications it tested used non-secure communication protocols, while 60% communicate with domains that are blacklisted by a reputation service ...

That article follows another cheerful one a month earlier, 100% of Top Paid Android Apps Have Been Hacked. It's not just Android/Google, but iOS/Apple, too: "56% of the Top 100 paid Apple iOS apps have been hacked".

Are these articles reliable? No idea. But if they are, then the security, privacy and control on offer from midata are questionable.

The people who maintain your personal data store (PDS) might or might not be trusted. Or trustworthy. That's up to you to decide.

But you don't have a clue about the third parties who develop apps.

The "identity providers" like Mydex who maintain PDSs are due to be paid a pittance by the government. Less than £1 per PDS. That's not enough to live on. They need more money than that to survive.

They could try to charge us as well as the government. But then we'll start to lose interest. Or they could try to make a bit on the side by charging a commission to the third party app developers for access to our PDSs. That's the developers whose apps allegedly "carry security or privacy risk" and which have allegedly been "hacked". No thank you.

Curtains.


Updated 5 February 2014:

The midata Innovation Lab produced five modest prototype apps.

Input came from the troika of BIS, Mydex and Ctrl-Shift, with additional consultancy advice from Manning Gottlieb and Atlantic Customer Solutions, oversight from RWE npower and O2, and implementation/coding done by Natural Interaction and Allfiled UK.

MI Energy is by Allfiled UK ("All about trust"). The other four apps are by Natural Interaction, a company with £30 of share capital behind it.

Take a look at MI Relative Calm, the app designed to manage care for your elderly relative ("Ruby") and to promote a sense of calm in you.

"Your relative's bank can supply data to help you keep track of any unusual activity that could indicate they've been taken advantage of", the app tells us. That is achieved by having the app download bank statements. We are also told that the app can "connect to your relative's energy supplier to make sure that their home environment is at a healthy temperature".

To achieve that, the app must have the user IDs and passwords to log on to Ruby's bank and energy suppliers. How do you know that the app doesn't pass those logon details back to Natural Interaction or to another third party? You don't. And the midata Innovation Lab haven't told us.

Who will vet apps to make sure that logon details are not being sent to any unauthorised parties? The midata Innovation Lab haven't told us.

Does a connection with midata imply that an app is trustworthy? Suppose that Ruby is the victim of fraud and it turns out that the wherewithal for committing that fraud came from your midata app. Suppose further that the bank refuses to compensate Ruby because you have revealed her logon details to a third party. Can you sue BIS? Or anyone else? The midata Innovation Lab haven't told us.

Remember, midata is meant to "empower the consumer". Funny way to go about it.

Now how calm are you feeling?

Meanwhile, back at the Cabinet Office, their Identity Assurance programme (IDA) promotes the idea that we should all have an on-line identity that can be vouched for by one or more "identity providers", e.g. Mydex.

This is a government-backed scheme. It should be solemn, conservative, confidence-inspiring, dependable, trustworthy.

People will expect a respectable and dignified relationship with their "identity providers".

They will not expect to discover that, via BIS, their "identity providers" are hand in glove with unknown app developers, upon the commissions payable by whom the "identity providers" depend for their survival.

RIP IDA.


Updated 6 February 2014:

Among other apps, mIL have developed MI Relative Calm. The story in this app revolves around Ruby, an elderly lady who needs caring for.

Log into the app and you'll find that it claims to monitor Ruby's health. Clearly mIL have got poor old Ruby permanently wired up to a lot of gadgets not only taking her pulse, counting her footsteps and measuring her sleep but also pronouncing on what is and isn't normal.

This expert app also monitors her energy usage and declares that "Ruby's home is at a safe temperature and her energy usage is normal".

And it monitors her bank account. The app is "clever" enough to know that a£500 withdrawal from her account is abnormal. Although not clever enough to send anyone a text.

Here are two characters in the app, John and Anne, using the chat facility to discuss the suspicious account activity, in one of the worst pieces of dialogue ever scripted. They speak in a winsome style never before observed in human beings. The conversation starts at the bottom of the sidebar on 29 October 2013 and finishes at the top, eight days earlier, such is midata's attention to detail.

21/10/2013 14:30

Yes please. Could you ask them for advice on how to stop this kind of thing?

21/10/2013 11:45

Shall I call the police? I can meet them with your mum.

29/10/2013 11:40

Oh no, I was worried something like this might happen.

29/10/2013 11:30

Not good news, someone knocked on the door at told Ruby that her gutters were blocked and it would cause damage. After they cleaned them, they took her to the cashpoint and took out the money.

29/10/2013 08:20

No John, I'll pop round and find out

29/10/2013 02:00

Hi Anne, do you know why mum took out £500 yesterday?

It turns out that John is Ruby's son. When he spotted the unusual activity on his mother's bank account, he didn't ring her. He rang Anne, the carer. Three days later, according to the bank statement.

You might wonder why Ruby didn't ring him, but it soon becomes clear that her son is inhuman, so there would be no point.

Ruby has been strongarmed by some ghastly man into giving him £500. Is the despicable John going to visit his mother and comfort her? No, he asks Anne to arrange for the police to do it. Anne doesn't demonstrate any sympathy either. Let's hope the police are a bit nicer.

This is mIL's idea of how to care for the elderly. Useless.

And note that all the gadgets are useless, too.

Despite being marched to the bank by a threatening man demanding money, Ruby's pulse remains normal according to her monitor and the number of steps she has taken during the day remains average. She hasn't lost any sleep and the house is still warm so there really is nothing for John to worry about. His mother's inner turmoil doesn't show up on any of the dials.

midata is meant to empower the consumer and to make the economy grow. This app developed by mIL is utterly irrelevant to either purpose.

midata is also meant to help its users to make rational decisions. But not, apparently, human decisions.


Updated 12.4.14

Au Royaume-Uni, cinq applis pour une conso protégée ... Le Midata Innovation Lab, division opérationnelle du programme, a accouché de cinq applis ... Ce sont des prototypes, mais certaines de ces applis pourraient être diffusées sur le marché.

Cinq applis complètement moches more like. Perfidious Albion fooling the poor old French again.

Updated 18.8.14

Here's a trick the midata Innovation Lab missed:

Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They’re in Heat ZOLLIKOFEN, Switzerland — When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes. Occasionally he gets an SMS from one of his cows. That is because Mr. Oesch, 60, who cares for a herd of 44 Red Holstein and Jersey dairy cows, is helping to test a device that implants sensors in cows to let farmers know when they are in heat. When that is the case, the device sends an SMS to the farmer’s phone. The Swiss do not settle for half measures: the SMS can be in any one of Switzerland’s three main languages — German, French and Italian — plus English or Spanish ...

Daniel Auf Der Mauer for The New York Times

Christian Oesch is testing a device that sends an SMS to his phone when a cow is sexually active.

Curtains for midata

Tom Loosemore is "not 'appy. Not 'appy at all"

It was two years ago, 3 November 2011, that Ed Davey when he was still at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) told the world about midata: "Today’s announcement marks the first time globally there has been such a Government-backed initiative to empower individuals with so much control over the use of their own data".

That data could form the basis for a new industry. Ctrl-Shift, the consultants advising BIS, told us that "access to such data represents a ‘holy grail’ data to companies because it explains why people do what they do and predicts what they are going to do next".

There was a perfunctory consultation and BIS issued a press release listing 10 ways that apps in a midata future could shape our choices, including this: "So where your favourite restaurant has deals or offers, you could be alerted in advance to take advantage and make a booking. Combined with other services, the programme could also indicate where you could save money or improve your health by eating elsewhere, drinking less or going out less".

The voluntary midata scheme became the statutory midata scheme when the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 was passed, including the Supply of Customer Data clauses 89-91: "The Secretary of State may by regulations require a regulated person to provide customer data (a) to a customer, at the customer’s request; (b) to a person who is authorised by a customer to receive the data, at the customer’s request or, if the regulations so provide, at the authorised person’s request" etc ...

Then the midata Innovation Lab (mIL) was set up with 22 Founding Partners including the likes of the BBC, Which?, Ofgem and nPower. "Hi I’m Dan, Director of the midata Innovation Lab, part of the midata voluntary programme", said Dan Bates, who was Working with business to fan the flames of innovation, "... we will help empower UK consumers in a really meaningful way ...".

That was May 2013, six months ago, and since then the mIL has been beavering away producing apps to demonstrate the incontrovertible value of midata and as we saw in midata kickstarts a collective inflection point in business they've produced five of them.

Five Prototype apps – MI Energy, MI Finance, MI Relative Calm, MI Health and MI Move.

Five.

Do you know how many apps there are in the world?

midata – the service you can trust

midata had one of its "turns" recently.

There was a sudden rash of publicity.

Ctrl-Shift News published Midata Learnings on 20 November 2013. "Learnings" is the new word for lessons and a review of the research work done by the midata Innovation Lab (mIL) is full of them:

In her speech at the Showcase event, held at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, Jo Swinson discussed the notion of ‘affordances’ – how an item designed to do one thing can usually be used to do many other things too. You don’t just sit on chairs for example. You may stand on one in order to change a light bulb.

Then the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) announced the release of The midata innovation opportunity. One of the learnings from mIL, according to the Executive Summary, is that:

Initiatives like the midata Innovation Lab can greatly accelerate the development of new concepts and approaches by creating an environment where diverse stakeholders can collaborate, learn from each other and experiment.

What new concepts, you want to ask, but you already know the answer – affordances.

And then from Mount Olympus there was a pronouncement from Mydex.

You will remember that Mydex believes that midata is historically inevitable, that resistance is futile, and that resistance is anyway irrational – midata is good for us.

They've revealed this learning to us before and yesterday they repeated it in The role of the individual in "digital by default" public services:

In conclusion and in summary I hope I've made the case that the deliberate and conscious introduction of a measure of personal control over personal data in this information age is inevitable, desirable and essential feasible, and an immediate priority ... immensely valuable to local public services ...

Some mysteries remain. How do you distinguish personal data from other data? In what way does the individual have control over his or her personal data?

But one thing is clear, according to Mydex. Beveridge got it wrong. His recipe for the welfare state omitted an essential ingredient – the personal data store (PDS).

And what do Mydex supply?

As luck would have it, PDSs – the missing link, "the key building block for this next stage is called Mydex".

Mydex believes that local authorities should connect with their parishioners via PDSs. That is no more than the historically inevitable correction of Beveridge. Moreover:

By connecting with them you have already fully equipped them for the GDS ID assurance process which will be required for next generation online public services rolling out within months.

Unmentioned by BIS (apart from a glancing reference on p.7 of their report bottom right), Mydex make it clear that midata is an essential part of the Government Digital Service's identity assurance programme, IDA:

Some people – thinking here for example Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service – make doing it right seem easy, but these are rare and valuable people [as opposed to all the other common and worthless people].

IDA has been pronounced dead by some, including DMossEsq. Mydex believe that identity-assured public services will be rolled out "within months". We shall see, therefore, within months, who is right.

Mydex remind us that there are five so-called "identity providers" who have been appointed for the UK:

Along with the Post Office, Verizon, and Experian Mydex is one of five services contracted by GDS to provide ID assurance for digital by default public services.

Why can't they bring themselves to mention Digidentity, the fifth "identity provider"?

Bad blood between them?

Maybe.

Certainly relations with Experian, the credit referencing agency, can't be cordial. "Why would a Council connect to Mydex?", Mydex asks:

There are a host of practical reasons why local public services would connect to Mydex. It’s easy to do. It’s a clean, standard API, easier that connecting to Facebook Connect or a credit agency’s data checking service, and without the downside of leeching data to third parties, contributing to the dubious economy of mechanically extracted aggregation of data about people you’re trying to serve, which sees them compared to bland archetypes and subjected to Kafkaesque scoring algorithms. Instead of all that the local authority can connect directly to real people [or at least to real PDSs], in all their diversity and complexity, with a single standard connection.

No-one wants to deal with a Kafkaesque leech.

And we don't have to, because when it comes to Mydex:

The end to end service is ISO27001 certified and tScheme compliant. Mydex is a founder member of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and the Open Identity Exchange which GDS has entrusted with running government’s ID assurance pilots. The Mydex connection is available via GCloud.

Your attention may be drawn to the G-Cloud reference. Two historical inevitabilities in one. Not only the historical inevitability of PDSs but also the historical inevitability of cloud computing previously conveyed to us from another peak in the Olympus range, Stephen Fry.

Well spotted. But you have a little more work to do yet.

Take a look at the claim that Mydex is tScheme-compliant.

What does it mean?

tScheme is a standards body set up to measure trust. If we're going to have digital-by-default public services, we need to know who can be trusted. tScheme has established a way of measuring trust and keeps a list of those services that achieve the required standards. The latest list includes Experian. But not the Post Office, Verizon or Digidentity. And not Mydex.

IDA is an ecosystem with only one species surviving – Experian.

Not only have Mydex not been approved by tScheme. They haven't even applied for approval. We know that because tScheme keep a list of applicants. And there's only one name on it – Verizon.

And in that glancing reference in the BIS report, who's in charge of research and analysis for IDA at mIL? Mydex? No. Verizon. (Assisted, for no discernible reason, by the BBC.)

What you can lesson from all this is that trust is an affordance in short supply at IDA. Unsurprisingly, as IDA's dead. And midata with it.

----------

Updated 9.12.14

There was dear old William Heath, just over a year ago, please see above, predicting confidently that the "next generation" of on-line public services would be "rolling out within months" with "identity assurance" supplied by GDS, the Government Digital Service.

Completely wrong, of course.

What we've actually got is on-line public services without GDS's identity assurance – applying to register to vote, for example. Either that, or on-line public services that people can't avail themselves of because the identity assurance doesn't work. For example, how many farmers are going to fail to get their 2015 CAP payments because of GDS's obtuse GOV.UK Verify scheme?

Nothing daunted, Mr Heath continues to believe that he knows the laws of history. midata is historically inevitable, he told us 18 months ago, like some latter-day Marxist. And, never mind the incorrect predictions in the meantime, the latest edition of Old Heath's Almanack treats us to the five stages on the "high road" to the digitisation of public services, please see 5 stages of evolution in UK digital public services.

"Start with paper". That's the first stage, apparently. Then there's "computerise" and "start afresh". With paper? No. With another computer. Then there's the tricky ingredient in the recipe – "add identity". If only. But no, there's still no identity assurance (RIP).

That's four stages along the high road. And the fifth? You already know. It's inevitable, remember – midata.

Specifically, it's Mydex, Mr Heath's company, providing us all with "personal data stores" so that we can "plug in the individual".

According to Mr Heath, that third stage, start afresh, has "already produced audited savings of £200m, with a true figure surely nearer UK £1bn". Surely? You mean the auditors are wrong? By a factor of 5-to-1? He's just being frivolous, isn't he.

And for the fourth stage, add identity, he says "target savings might be £10bns in the lifetime of the next Parliament". What kind of a prediction is "might be"? Answer, a loose one – far too flabby a prediction for the high road. Tens of billions of pounds of frivolity.

And when you plug in the individual, what happens then? "Target savings might be the best part of £100bn over two Parliaments". Another "might be". Enough frivolity now to make a big dent in the national debt. Is this in addition to the £10 billion that Mr Heath has already promised us? It's not clear. A minor detail, no doubt, if you're the Nostradamus de nos jours.

There are an estimated four million people in this country at the moment too poor to eat properly.

Let them eat digitisation? After all, the UK is one of the five most digitised countries in the world. That's what the Cabinet Office say, and they're holding a two-day conference starting today to prove it, please see D5 London 2014: leading digital governments. Don't miss it. You can watch the conference being live-tweeted. Feast yourself.

Let them eat midata? Funnily enough, everyone at the high road branch of the food bank will be able to do just that from April Fool's Day next year: "price comparison website Gocompare is to launch a 'midata current account tool' from 1 April next year". Yum.

Tories seek to avert rift with Church of England over food bank report, it said in yesterday morning's Guardian. Silly old Church of England. Silly old Tories. People don't really want food. They want an "API economy". That's what Mr Heath says.

An API, of course, is an applications program interface, and who's going to give everyone an API economy?

None other than Mr Heath's Mydex Community Interest Company: "Mydex CIC could roll out 55m Personal Data Stores free to individuals today", and worth every penny.

midata – the service you can trust

midata had one of its "turns" recently.

There was a sudden rash of publicity.

Ctrl-Shift News published Midata Learnings on 20 November 2013. "Learnings" is the new word for lessons and a review of the research work done by the midata Innovation Lab (mIL) is full of them:

In her speech at the Showcase event, held at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, Jo Swinson discussed the notion of ‘affordances’ – how an item designed to do one thing can usually be used to do many other things too. You don’t just sit on chairs for example. You may stand on one in order to change a light bulb.

Then the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) announced the release of The midata innovation opportunity. One of the learnings from mIL, according to the Executive Summary, is that:

Initiatives like the midata Innovation Lab can greatly accelerate the development of new concepts and approaches by creating an environment where diverse stakeholders can collaborate, learn from each other and experiment.

What new concepts, you want to ask, but you already know the answer – affordances.