Why?  We were working on the basis that the information economy becoming increasingly important in the US,  founded on the confluence of the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and could be recreated in UK plc, helping to give British companies a global marketplace in information products and services in English established on the platform of a successful domestic industry resulting from public-private partnership.

And now, 22 years later and to a blaze of media triumphalism, it is here.  Following the intervention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee , and the Prime Minister saying ” Let’s Do It !”, www.data.gov.uk has arrived as the agency for access and licensing.  Those who want the full story should go to the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, and then remember the long campaign fought by that newspaper in support of this cause.  I am hugely happy that this has happened, and  hope that the private sector, and all of the “accidental” publishers  flourishing on the web,  will grab this opportunity with both hands and use the data now available creatively to demonstrate what can be done.

And I am very worried.  In the intervening period I served for five years on the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information.  I know that the government site is still only carrying a thin slice of what is available for re-use.  I know too that the last 22 years have been marked by two things: the extreme reluctance of the UK Treasury and so-called trading funds to abandon or downscale the idea of earning fees and royalties to defray the cost of collection, updating and then selling data that they have a statutory duty to collect at the taxpayer’s expense; and the whole psychology of power retention and the implicit government servant vow of omerta that surrounds the reluctance of government to divulge anything but the most basic of information for fear that it could be used against the giver.

So will the Berners Lee initiative work?  We had better hope so, since our information economy in the UK badly needs it to do so.  But Sir Tim and his colleagues need to go on a Billy Graham-style conversion campaign to re-educate government in the collaborative nature of the Web.  And win over those bastions of protected trading rights, the Meteorological Office, the Ordnance Survey, and, neither government fish nor private sector fowl, Royal Charter operations like the Environment Agency or the BBC. The resistance already have a hefty victory over postcodes(http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22222 ) And then they tackle an even more difficult issue: local government.

There is certainly no scope for self-satisfaction in all of this.  Sir Tim has now made the issue real to all players, something which has taken 22 years to achieve.  It would be dreadful if the political element in all of this became a casualty of the forthcoming UK General Election.  It needs all party support.  It would be pointless to spend the next 22 years expanding the base of available content so slowly that the benefits identified by the changes were imperceptible in their impact.  And above all, we need to be aware of how easy it could be for opponents to win back some of the ground that they have lost.  A report in the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper, indicates search analytics in the US being used to ” de-anonymize” anonymized personal data, presumably by finding patterns of activity which equate to prior behaviour.  Thank goodness few UK civil servants read the Observer: the idea that names and addresses might be re-attached to medical records, for example, would shut down epidemiological research overnight in our risk-averse culture.

Within Europe, no country has organized the defence of personal data with more efficientcy than Germany. Yet it is there at the moment that we see a glimmer of light.  This month’s issue of SCL, the journal of the Society for Computers and Law contains a fascinating account by Andreas Ruhmkon of the case against the German ratings website www.spickmich.de.  This site – in English “copy or crib from me ” – rates German schools and their teachers.  Users are registered, and can score the teachers in their schools on a scale of 1 to 6 (where one is high) across a range of criteria.  These include “cool and funny”, “popular”, “motivated”, “good teaching” and “fair marks”.  Students can only complete this evaluation for the schools for which they have registered, responses that include only top and bottom scores are omitted to avoid abuses, and students can include quotations from the teacher concerned to illustrate their scores.  The system has become very popular in Germany, and has been copied elsewhere.

Inevitably, a German teacher sought an injunction to remove her data.  She felt that categories like cool and funny, human and popular infringed her privacy, while her quotations were her own property, and the site could not designate her name, age, sex, qualifications or subject expertise without her permission, despite this information being available on the school web site. (She was, by the way, rated by her pupils as a 4.3)

While she was initially given an injunction by a district court, the case finally went to the Federal Court of Justice on appeal.  Here she lost the case, on the very fascinating grounds that freedom of expression outweighed the individual’s rights to privacy, given that here the question of privacy was decided in the social sphere, the teacher’s professional capacity, and not in regard to her personal life.  While it seems to me that social and private sometimes co-mingle in ways that are less easy to sort out than this one, we should all welcome the German court decision as a sensible blow for freedom.  And while doing so it is worth noting that European Human Rights legislation, mirrored in the German Constitution, generally overrides data protection legislation like the German BDSG.  The exception appears, once again, to be France: the service www.note2be.com was ordered to remove the names of teachers because the service, according to Mr. Ruhmkon, would “endanger the functioning of the (French) educational system”.

In the UK, sites like www.ratemyteacher.com and www.ratemylecturer.com are already active.  Mr Ruhmkon reports libel actions against www.iwantgreatcare.org (physicians ratings) and www.williseemytutor.com has reportedly been closed by such threats.  And yet the German example does offer the hope that the existing social framework of freedom of expression will, in virtual as well as real society, rightly overcome unnecessary privacy rights claimed in the network which do not exist in the real world.