The woman’s response, as Lewis reported it, was an interesting one: “It’s a public train, for heaven’s sake.”

Under this framing, it would appear that there are no customs or manners about noise in public places in Britain nowadays. Individuals and families are allowed peace and quiet at home. But once they leave that private space, they must put up with the freedom of others to do what they want, to impose and interrupt and disturb them at will.

The initial situation Lewis described is now depressingly familiar. Indeed the phenomenon, now known as “loudcasting”, has become so widespread that some travelers report facing it on pretty much every journey they take. Last week, the Prime Minister announced a campaign that promises to punish offenders with fines — though the instruction to watch videos “quietly”, rather than silently, suggests that little will change.

The practice is so objectionable because it irrupts through the boundary of our private space, imposing unchosen noise into the stream of thoughts that make for an individual life, while making private conversations more strained and difficult. It effectively imposes a law of the jungle onto public spaces, contributing to a sort of high-tech state of nature where the loudest and most brazen dominate public places, imposing their passing whims on everyone else.

The customs of private and public life that frame such encounters are the subject of Tiffany Jenkins’ recent book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. The book comes with a warning: that private life is not just under threat in the Western world, but has been under attack — and in retreat — for decades. Long before consumer technology allowed us to place our private thoughts, intimate pictures and noise tastes into the public realm, the barriers between private and public life were collapsing.

As Jenkins writes, “by the mid-1970s, the idea of a private life as freedom from interference, forged over centuries, was evaporating.” In Britain, the Younger Commission Report of 1972 revealed a generational divide, with people aged 45 and above describing privacy as “keeping your own private affairs to yourself” and “other people minding their own business”, while younger people defined it in terms of “leading your life as you want to lead it” and the like.

This might help to make sense of the couple that Martin Lewis encountered on the train. They were leading their lives as they wanted to. It was just that, by doing so, they were making it impossible for those around them to do the same.

Pressure on private life has come from many directions in recent times, not least from our own actions online. Revolutionary Leftist politics has also done its bit. In the late Eighties, the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon argued that the very division between public and private spheres should be dissolved, suggesting that it “works to protect systematic inequality” and serves “male supremacy”. Another radfem, Carol Hanisch, meanwhile promoted the idea that “The Personal is Political”, one consequence being that all personal (i.e. private) life is open to scrutiny and intrusion. The Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing chimed in with the assertion that family life is a primary source of mental illness and social dysfunction, while promoting psychology, his own practice, as “the key to the interpretation of experience in its political significance.” From here on, it seems now, your private thoughts would be a primary target of experts seeking to engineer social change.

Social science, including psychology, has a crucial role here as a source of authority that justifies intrusions into the private world of the self and intimate relations. These intrusions, it is claimed, address the root causes of social problems. Left-wing social scientists and political figures treat such things as “hate” and “Islamophobia” as if they are perversions of the mind that the state and civil society must work to eliminate. The individual’s role is to follow and do what they are told; to line up on the Right Side of History, not to think and feel for themselves but to defer to the experts.

The big claims of sociology and psychology that underlie such efforts often tend toward totalitarianism. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera recognized something like this in the Soviet bloc in which he lived his early adult life, valuing by contrast the space that liberal society offered. “Public and private are two essentially different worlds”, he says in one of the opening epigraphs to Jenkins’ book, and “respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free.”

Jenkins herself states: “It is essential to have a private space shielded from corporate, state and public scrutiny — a place where we can be alone.” Solitude, she says, “enables us to develop an inner life and a sense of self without constant external pressures.”

These “constant external pressures” may be those of the state, but they can also be those of our fellow human beings, variously “loudcasting” on the bus, shouting about politics via amplified sound systems in our town centers, or even dropping litter.

In a recent BBC article, Dr Rachael Kent, a senior lecturer in digital economy and society at King’s College, London, suggested that loudcasting is “performative… a way to rebel.” Harry Witchel, a professor of physiology at the University of Sussex, meanwhile described it as a “phenomenon of marking social territory”. Littering is similar: the person dropping the takeaway food carton or used water bottle on the street is rather like a dog peeing against a lamppost. They are leaving their imprint on the world, marking their presence, affecting others, perhaps enjoying how they can get away with it.

In this way, private life isn’t just something we experience between the four walls of our home. We take it with us: on the train, in the streets and the hospital waiting room. The condition of respecting it is what we might call “civility”: courtesy and politeness, respecting others.

In Britain, Jenkins writes, private life and the civility which facilitates it developed largely by accident from the late 17th century on, in response to religious and political conflict. “Out of the convoluted twists of history and the English Civil Wars, England’s people eventually forged a path towards the idea that political communities could survive in the midst of religious diversity if they limited their activities to a ‘private’ sphere, thus endorsing its possibility.”

In this time, toleration and freedom of conscience emerged as principles regulating public life. Queen Elizabeth I summed up the new spirit with the words, “Her Majesty is not inclined to peer into men’s hearts and secret thoughts”, later rendered into the famous line: “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” As Jenkins puts it, “the new political order… established that there were places the state could not go. From this the private realm was built.”

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By these principles, an individual human being was thereby allowed a space of their own to think and feel as they wished, in a “society of strangers”. This society was necessarily composed of people who, by and large, showed restraint and refrained from imposing themselves on others. In retrospect, perhaps the old reality of the train carriage full of silent commuters was the apotheosis of this, reflecting a society of non-interference and suppressed self-expression: Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty” made flesh.

The changes we are now experiencing reflect an evolution of liberal society away from restraint and towards self-expression, or what Berlin would describe as “positive liberty”. Globalization has also contributed, bringing together populations who do not observe such strange rules as the divide between religion (as private) and politics (public).

Islam, for example, particularly in its modern Islamist strains, is a public, political religion whose leaders would never accept God being consigned to a private sphere, let alone one of individual choice. Conservative dress, such as the niqab, is one part of this. Public prayer, of the kind that occurred in Trafalgar Square in March, is another, as is the more abstract expectation that Muslims serve the “ummah”: that is, the global community of Muslims. There is private life for Muslims under the leaders who require or encourage this behavior, but it’s not the same sort of private life that developed in the West. This sort of private life is not a place for religion but a place that must not interfere with religion. Even those Westerners who are not Muslim must take more and more care to mind their language when they talk about Islam, lest they suffer social or legal consequences or even be forced into hiding. Thus they, too, find their lives to be further intruded on by religion.

This reality jars against one of the most important aspects of private life for Jenkins: its interdependence with public life. As we have seen, private life is vulnerable and requires public permission. It requires the state but also our fellow human beings to show restraint. In turn, public life benefits, at least in theory, from the space available for thought and reflection in private life.

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Systems of multiculturalism and diversity appear to threaten this idealized state of affairs, with old liberal rights that used to attach to the individual being quietly transferred to what are termed “communities”, overseen by community and group leaders. This attaches the Muslim, gay or black individual to the group rather than affirming their right to think and feel for themselves.

Individual conscience and freedom of thought have little role in this system of diversity, either for members of protected groups or for outsiders, who are more or less prohibited from interfering with this allocation of authority away from the individual and towards group representatives. In this way, through systemic multiculturalism and diversity, the relationship between private thought and public action, a crucial plank behind the promise of liberal democracy, has at least partially broken down.

Splitting the necessary world of society and politics from private life was, we might reflect now, a civilizing process: allowing individuals, families and intimates the space to think, reflect, make mistakes, indulge interests and explore possibilities without being subject to the controlling gaze and noise of public life — including community leaders demanding fealty. As Hannah Arendt said, “Thinking and acting are not the same, and to the extent that I wish to think I have to withdraw from the world.”

The distinction between public and private also allows us the space to reach towards greatness. For, unlike what arts bureaucrats tell us, greatness in art and culture doesn’t arise from immersing ourselves in group orthodoxies, but from the mind being allowed to roam free. As Jenkins puts it, “Originality begins in private, shaded from the conformity of social pressures, long before it is made public.”  The act of creation itself, as with scientific discovery, arises out of the self: from being on your own.

That self — and the private life that nurtures and protects it — is a foundation of modern freedom and civilization. We let it wither further at our peril.

For 10 years, Coleman loved his job teaching math and technology in Fall River, Mass. He lived for the “teachable moments” when young minds lit up and grasped concepts during lively, spontaneous tangents from lesson plans. Then his district mandated that he use i-Ready, an online platform that delivers canned tests and “personalized learning” on internet-connected devices. Coleman wasn’t wild about it. His students began complaining bitterly. Many disengaged entirely or learned to game the system. 

Then a directive came down that usage of the system would increase. “The day that the principal told us that we needed to do i-Ready three times a week, that’s when I was done,” he tells me. “It was three hours a week for each class, when we only had five hours a week. So 60% of the teaching was going to be done by this computer that the kids absolutely hate. That’s not what I went to college for.”

Coleman’s story isn’t unusual. Across the United States, veteran teachers in public and private schools alike describe a quiet exodus from a profession radically transformed by i-Ready and other educational-technology, or “ed-tech,” platforms.  

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Of course, American education has had a rough few decades; student achievement continues to fall ever further behind other developed nations. Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk “data-based” panaceas like i-Ready. 

Marketed as a high-tech solution to lagging scores on government-mandated tests, i-Ready is used across 30-plus US states and a staggering 70% of the top-100 school districts, covering nearly half of elementary- and middle-school children. This, even though i-Ready has never been proved to successfully teach, immerses already-screen-addled kids in yet more screens, and in all likelihood is making America’s children quantifiably dumber.

But storm clouds are gathering. Teachers are whispering their outrage. Parents are organizing to demand that their children be allowed to opt out. And last year, i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit that insists the platform is less about e-learning than it is a data-extraction racket exploiting minors without parental consent.

Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this essay 

In the $94 billion North American ed-tech market of 2026, Curriculum Associates stands as a dominant pillar. Founded in 1969, the firm operated for decades as a sleepy, also-ran textbook publisher before pivoting to the nascent e-learning market in the late aughts. Today, the company is a private-equity-backed juggernaut with more than 2,700 employees and $750 million in annual revenue — derived overwhelmingly from America’s taxpayer-funded public schools.

Curriculum Associates’ flagship product is i-Ready. First launched in 2011, it has evolved into two tightly intertwined screen-based products. i-Ready Inform is the diagnostic half: standardized “adaptive” tests given three times per subject annually. The other half is i-Ready Learning, which translates each student’s i-Ready Inform scores into algorithmically generated lessons called “My Path.” This takes the form of gamified multiple-choice math and English questions delivered by infantile cartoon characters with names like “Yoop Yooply” and “Snargg.” 

The sales pitch is that kids benefit from a kind of one-on-one “personalized instruction” that today’s teachers are simply stretched too thin to deliver. In practice, it usually means that in any one classroom, 25 headphones-wearing students are silently absorbing 25 unrelated e-lessons on a grid of glowing screens, rather than interacting in shared learning moments. 

In traditional, analog education, human teachers can apply infinite adaptations to assist struggling students, answering questions and reading facial expressions and classroom energy. But when kids answer i-Ready questions incorrectly, the system merely swaps in new numbers or texts and instantly regurgitates them through the same characters and scripts. For millions of children, this quickly becomes excruciatingly repetitive.

A private math coach in Alaska describes kids’ frustration to me in stark terms. “I’ve been tutoring for 25-plus years. In my experience, universally, without a doubt, every single kid hates i-Ready. Even my most diligent, self-taught kids loathe it.” 

When children are mandated to spend hours each week using a tool they actively detest, it trains them to equate schoolwork with coercion and monotony. The danger is not merely that kids dislike i-Ready; it’s that the software risks poisoning their attitudes toward learning as such.

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Across the internet, students howl visceral invective against i-Ready: thousands of one-star ratings dominate on Apple’s App Store, excoriating i-Ready as “mentally exhausting,” “THE WORST,” and “a nightmare.” On websites like Sitejabber, which aggregates consumer reviews, thousands more one-star ratings accompany statements like: “It makes students want to kill themselves.” A recent YouTube video titled “i-Ready GARBAGE” racked up 350,000 views in one week; its creator calls i-Ready a “medieval torture method.” 

Given this extraordinary geyser of acid bile from i-Ready’s own captive user base, it’s unsurprising that on both its official YouTube channels, Curriculum Associates disables all commenting. 

As for educators, many view i-Ready as a vocational and philosophical threat: a substitution of analytics and algorithms for human insight, one that erodes teachers’ role as decision-makers and is a Trojan Horse for the total machine takeover of education. Teachers resoundingly give i-Ready a failing grade at Common Sense Media and take to private Facebook groups and Reddit in droves to vent that it is “useless” and “toxic.” 

The most common educator complaint is that i-Ready replaces finite, invaluable teaching time with gratuitous additional testing. “Ms. A,” a director of math curricula at a California public charter school, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, explains that “we lose between three and six weeks of actual instruction time every year taking the i-Ready assessments, and our teachers don’t find it useful at all.”

That problem is compounded in districts that also mandate i-Ready Learning. Although Curriculum Associates nominally recommends limiting usage to 45 minutes per subject per week, institutional pressure to demonstrate Stretch Growth® — CA’s convoluted internal metric that conveniently interprets failure and success as grounds for more i-Ready use — often bloats into hours of student screen time every day.

Teachers resent that i-Ready strips them of the authority to design lessons based on years of experience, effectively demoting them to a demeaning hybrid role: part test proctor, part IT support, part teaching assistant to their digital stand-in. Worse, educators are expected to treat i-Ready’s algorithmic assessments as definitive, even when the results contradict their firsthand knowledge of students’ abilities. 

Coleman, the Massachusetts teacher, recalls the program reporting that his class couldn’t solve basic geometry problems he knew they had already mastered. The software “was telling me my kids were completely ignorant,” he said. “But I knew for a fact they could take apart a right-angle triangle and figure out the other angles.” In his experience, many students gamed or rushed through the diagnostics, generating incorrect scores that then locked them into weeks of needlessly remedial lessons.

However heartfelt or valid their objections to i-Ready, many teachers dare not protest once a school or district implements the system. As Coleman explains, educators “will not stick their necks out, they don’t want to get fired … teachers are terrified.” This anxiety is exacerbated because the program itself also becomes a vector of almost Orwellian surveillance. Last year, “Mr. J,” a West Virginia teacher, received a reprimand after local officials noticed his students weren’t clocking the minimum i-Ready minutes per week. “A district administrator came to my class and sat me down and told me that I had to do what I’m told,” he explained. “Teachers at my school are worried…. There’s absolute fear.” 

You might assume that i-Ready must meet rigorous standards to lead district leaders to insist on its use, over and against the complaints of teachers and students. But you’d assume wrong.  The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, requires schools to use evidence-based programs. Yet those standards are far looser than the public imagines. Genuine proof of the effectiveness of a program requires multiyear, independently run, randomized trials — which are slow and expensive. 

To date, no such gold-standard studies support i-Ready’s effectiveness. A 2016 Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy Brief warned “there is no evidence that [i-Ready] provides information that teachers can use to help students learn,” and chided Curriculum Associates for claiming “their assessments have the ability to increase learning,” when “none of the studies we found were peer-reviewed or independent.” 

Instead, Curriculum Associates routinely turns to its own employees and paid contractors to produce non-randomized quasi-experimental studies that meet only the very lowest threshold of ESSA evidence — enabling the firm to legally market i-Ready as “evidence-based” without substantiating the claim in a manner rigorous enough to pass muster with independent scientists. 

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Public LinkedIn profiles reveal that Curriculum Associates staffs a research-and-analytics  department with more than 50 full-time data and psychometrics scientists, whose names appear as authors on a steady stream of positive white-paper self-evaluations — all housed in the company’s own painstakingly search-optimized Research Library. 

Critics point to this as fitting the textbook definition of science-washing: credentialed employees using scientific language and internal data to overwhelm would-be doubters with well-packaged supportive documentation — a convincing facsimile of true scientific rigor. 

Lisa LeVasseur of Internet Safety Labs, which evaluates ed-tech software, says the strategy carries ominous echoes of Big Tobacco’s heyday: “Curriculum Associates funding their own research sounds like part of what I call the ‘Product Safety Resistance Playbook,’ which the tobacco industry pioneered back in 1953. It’s a whole set of social-engineering strategies to attack unfavorable research and fund bullshit research that showed positive things about cigarettes. And now we’re seeing that playbook again.”

Curriculum Associates, to be sure, also commissions evaluations from prestigious academic brands like the Johns Hopkins Center for Research & Reform in Education, or CRRE, which has produced at least seven CA-sponsored studies supporting i-Ready’s efficacy. Each study stresses that the underlying data is provided by school districts by way of touting its independence. Yet this sidesteps the reality that even district-supplied data are born of the firm’s closed i-Ready algorithm, which researchers can’t audit. That i-Ready generates the in-house black-box data upon which its supporting studies depend means that CA effectively operates a closed-loop evidence system, highlighting these affirmations in its Research Library as proof that i-Ready works.

Asked to clarify Johns Hopkins’ policy on whether its clients are permitted to review or edit their fee-for-service studies, CRRE Executive Director Steven Ross replied via email that “we don’t have a written policy,” adding that “they may offer caveats or suggestions for editing.”

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University research departments, moreover, routinely post their output to online government databases, including the Education Resources Information Center. ERIC is a mere digital archive which does not evaluate the legitimacy of any studies stored therein. But when i-Ready’s self-funded studies appear atop Google search results on the US Department of Education’s ED.GOV web domain, replete with federal ID numbers, it signals a government-vetted imprimatur that the research doesn’t actually have. The end result is credibility laundering: Curriculum Associates’ marketing studies wear federal government badges they didn’t earn — a distinction few district administrators or school board members are capable of making before deciding whether to implement i-Ready.

Perhaps more troubling is that on rare occasions when truly independent research into i-Ready has been conducted, Curriculum Associates has materially distorted mixed or negative findings.  For example, CA’s research library summarizes a 2018 WestEd/Gates Foundation evaluation as evidence that i-Ready students “demonstrated a significant improvement in their scores” on the Smarter Balanced Assessment and “tended to score 24 points higher.” 

But to the vanishingly few who slog through the 52-page report, the opposite picture emerges. WestEd cautioned that “causal conclusions about the impact of i-Ready cannot be made.” Students described lessons as “repetitive” and said they were “not learning new material,” while teachers reported that the diagnostic results “did not match their own perceptions of students’ readiness.” In other words: Curriculum Associates took a study festooned with red flags and repackaged it as a blue ribbon.  

So how is a product so unloved and so untested now compulsory for a generation of American K-8 students? Like other companies whose target market is government bureaucracy, Curriculum Associates employs lobbyists across the county. A filed lobbying disclosure by the firm declares an intention to “promote education technology within federal compliance standards,” and job postings for senior government-relations positions seek candidates “to drive policy wins with state leaders that grow student learning and expand CA’s business.” 

One tactic to drive policy wins is Curriculum Associates’ “Diamond Level” sponsorship of conferences for the Council of the Great City Schools, or CGCS, an organization that engages in federal- and state-level lobbying on behalf of America’s 81 largest school districts. CGCS brochures indicate its Diamond Level sponsors enjoy VIP access to top district leaders and are “entitled to share gifts and/or materials with attendees.”  

In 2019, an unprecedented joint initiative by CGCS and Los Angeles Unified School District selected Curriculum Associates as one of just three (out of 100) ed-tech publishers to develop “high-quality instruction materials.” A news release encouraged districts nationwide to piggyback on a no-haggle contract, assuring them “15 major city school systems have already expressed interest,” and CGCS’ Urban Educator newsletter praised the effort to “harness the joint purchasing power of the nation’s major city school systems.” The criteria for selecting Curriculum Associates over 97 other publishers were never released, despite the choice creating a de-facto whitelist of national vendors. 

While there is no public accounting of exactly how many urban districts ultimately contracted with Curriculum Associates because of the CGCS consortium, news releases indicate that its classroom penetration surged 75% in the four years following, jumping to 14 million by 2023.

i-Ready didn’t achieve its stranglehold on US classrooms because school boards are foolish or malicious, however. It’s because i-Ready is exquisitely designed to prey on education leaders’ accountability anxiety. Today, poor scores on federally mandated assessments can trigger state intervention plans, tank school ratings, animate angry parents, and place proverbial heads on chopping blocks.

So when i-Ready promises “actionable data” and a “path to proficiency” packaged in color-coded dashboards exuding scientific precision, it’s catnip for superintendents desperate to inoculate themselves from sanctions, lousy headlines, and charges of ineptitude. i-Ready enables district brass to say “we’re on this” by subjecting students as young as kindergarten to the stress and tedium of six additional standardized tests per year. 

Once implemented, the black-box system is perniciously self-perpetuating. Low i-Ready scores serve as proof that students will benefit from more i-Ready lessons. Over time, districts embrace the circular logic and begin optimizing not for actual learning, but for improved metrics within the i-Ready ecosystem.

There’s also alarming evidence that i-Ready plans to colonize more of the school experience. In late 2023, Curriculum Associates acquired Ireland’s Soapbox Labs, which specializes in AI recognition of children’s voices. A spring 2025 news release indicates that i-Ready is actively integrating SoapBox’s voice engine, which “will allow children to read aloud while the technology listens, analyzes, and provides timely feedback.” 

Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia praised the plan, declaring that it would soon be “giving teachers back precious instructional time” — when, in fact, it is designed to supplant teacher interaction with students. By automating the act of listening to a child read and responding in real time, the software supplants one of the most intimate instructional roles a teacher performs and turns the teacher into a mere supervisor.

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In July 2025, Curriculum Associates also acquired Stile Education, an Australian ed-tech company that produces middle-school online science curricula. “Expanding into science is the next obvious strategic priority for us,” Sia explained in a news release. This means i-Ready’s core portfolio could soon balloon beyond its math and English to absorb science classes, boosting kids’ screen time even more. 

Another concern is privacy. i-Ready, just like social-media apps, is built for internet-connected mass data extraction — tracking and recording users’ every click, scroll, keystroke, and pause. According to its own Data Handling & Privacy Statement, i-Ready combines such “usage metrics” with personally identifiable information, including the names, birthdays, and racial backgrounds of its 14 million student users. And because it is a cloud-based system, i-Ready’s data extraction continues unabated whether children are in a classroom or in the privacy of their own bedrooms doing i-Ready homework on school-issued devices. 

The rub here is that minors can’t legally consent to surrendering their privacy for industrial-scale harvesting. In fact, American children are supposed to be protected by strict privacy laws. Federal laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Acts are meant to shield children from predatory digital exploitation. But both contain loopholes big enough for Curriculum Associates to exploit. 

In December 2025, a group of parent activists filed suit in a federal court in Massachusetts, accusing i-Ready of amounting to a compulsory child-surveillance system. The complaint alleges that CA sells “highly intimate academic and psychographic profiles of children” to advertising, marketing, and consumer-data-profiling companies. It further asserts that the company evades child-privacy laws by forcing families to surrender basic privacy rights in exchange for a public education. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages under wiretap, privacy, and consumer-protection laws. 

In 2026, a mere 15 years after launching, i-Ready isn’t some upstart tech disruptor — it’s the status quo. With roughly 14 million students jacked into the platform, and usage guidelines requiring roughly 54 hours per child annually, that’s a conservatively estimated 750 million hours (or 86,000 years) of childhood consumed by i-Ready screen time annually — a breathtaking displacement of young American lives into one company’s experimental ecosystem. 

Which raises the fundamental question: has i-Ready delivered results? The big picture suggests not. Because i-Ready’s core selling point has always been improved performance on government-mandated assessments, those same standardized tests offer a common-sense measure of the product’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, results indicate that i-Ready’s screen-based learning paradigm has been a bust. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was established by Congress in 1969 as the benchmark of American academic performance. While NAEP showed broad student-achievement gains in the early 2000s, during the 2010s, when smartphones and ed-tech took over, achievement flattened. On NAEP’s 2025 Nation’s Report Card, America’s reading scores continue to fall, math gains are minimal, and achievement gaps between low-income students and their affluent peers are widening. NAEP may not explicitly point to i-Ready as causing the decline, but it undercuts any claim that the platform’s massive market share is reversing it. 

As for hope that i-Ready districts buck that trend, even Curriculum Associates’ own State of Student Learning 2025 report — based on diagnostic data from all 14 million current i-Ready students — acknowledges that “academic recovery has stalled nationwide,” with “little change or small declines” across nearly all grades, subjects, and income levels in the previous year. The report reveals that i-Ready users’ proficiency has regressed so deeply that in Grade 8 Math, 60% of students fail to reach grade level — a failure rate that has increased since 2019. Worse, nearly 30% of fifth graders are two or more years behind, proving that the i-Ready algorithm is not a recovery engine, but a stagnation trap. 

And so the rise of i-Ready has mirrored a collapse of US academic achievement. This demands we finally ask: if i-Ready simply doesn’t work, at what point does America’s education establishment cut its losses and declare it digital snake oil — a boondoggle of historic proportions?

If and when we do, Benjamin Coleman won’t miss it. He still yearns for a return to the personal, empathetic classroom dynamics he watched Curriculum Associates steadily erode. “There is no teachable moment with i-Ready, man,” he says. “It’s all kids sitting in silence staring at the freaking screen. It takes the humanity out of education. It’s very sad.”

Chat Control, formally known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was first proposed by the European Commission in 2022. The original plan would have made it mandatory for email and messenger providers to scan private, even encrypted, communications — with the purported aim of detecting child sexual abuse material. 

The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes. But critics argued that the tool risked becoming a blueprint for generalized surveillance, by essentially giving states and EU institutions the ability to scan every private message. Indeed, a public consultation preceding the proposal revealed that a majority of respondents opposed such obligations, with over 80% of explicitly rejecting its application to end-to-end encrypted communications.

Yet despite repeated blockages, and widespread criticism for violating privacy and fundamental rights, the text was never abandoned. Instead, it was repackaged, and continually pushed forward from one Council presidency to the next. Each time democratic resistance stopped the original plan, it kept returning in new forms, under new labels, each time dressed up as a “necessary” and “urgent” tool to protect children online, yet always preserving its core logic: normalizing government-mandated monitoring of private communications on an unprecedented scale. 

In May, the European Commission once again presented its proposal. Yet several states objected. That included Germany, but also Poland, Austria and the Netherlands. As a result, Denmark, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, immediately began drafting a new version, known as “Chat Control 2.0” and unveiled earlier this month, which removed the requirement for general monitoring of private chats; the searches would now remain formally voluntary for providers. All this happened under the auspices of Coreper, the Committee of Permanent Representatives — one of the most powerful, but least visible, institutions in the EU decision-making process. It is where most EU legislation is actually negotiated; if Coreper agrees on a legislative file, member states almost always rubber-stamp it. 

The gamble worked. Yesterday, this revised version was quietly greenlit by Coreper, essentially paving the way for the text’s adoption by the Council, possibly as early as December. As digital rights campaigner and former MEP Patrick Breyer put it, this maneuver amounts to “a deceptive sleight of hand” aimed at bypassing meaningful democratic debate and oversight. 

While the removal of mandatory on-device detection is an improvement on the first draft, the new text still contains two extremely problematic features. First, it encourages “voluntary” mass scanning by online platforms — a practice already allowed in “temporary” form, which would now become a lasting feature of EU law. Second, it effectively outlaws anonymous communication by introducing mandatory age-verification systems. 

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An open letter signed by 18 of Europe’s leading cybersecurity and privacy academics warned that the latest proposal poses “high risks to society without clear benefits for children”. The first, in their view, is the expansion of “voluntary” scanning, including automated text analysis using AI to identify ambiguous “grooming” behaviors. This approach, they argue, is deeply flawed. Current AI systems are incapable of properly distinguishing between innocent conversation and abusive behavior. As the experts explain, AI-driven grooming detection risks sweeping vast numbers of normal, private conversations into a dragnet, overwhelming investigators with false positives and exposing intimate communications to third parties. 

Breyer further emphasized this danger by noting that no AI can reliably distinguish between innocent flirtation, humorous sarcasm — and criminal grooming. He warned that this amounts to a form of digital witch-hunt, whereby the mere appearance of words like “love” or “meet” in a conversation between family members, partners or friends could trigger intrusive scrutiny. This is not child protection, Breyer has argued, but mass suspicion directed at the entire population. Even under the existing voluntary regime, German federal police warn that roughly half of all reports received are criminally irrelevant, representing tens of thousands of leaked legal chats annually. According the Swiss Federal Police, meanwhile, 80% of machine-reported content is not illegal. It might, for example, encompass harmless holiday photos showing nude children playing at a beach. The new text would expand these risks dramatically. 

Further concerns arise from Article 4 of the new compromise proposal, which requires providers to implement “all appropriate risk mitigation measures”. This clause could allow authorities to pressure encrypted messaging services to enable scanning, even if this undermines their core security model. In practice, this could mean requiring providers such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to scan messages on users’ devices before encryption is applied. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted that this approach risks creating a permanent security infrastructure, one which could gradually become universal. Meta, Google and Microsoft already scan unencrypted content voluntarily; extending this practice to encrypted content would merely require technical changes. Moreover, what begins as a voluntary option can easily become compulsory in practice, as platforms face reputational, legal and market pressure to “cooperate” with the authorities. Furthermore, this doesn’t affect just people in the EU, but everyone around the world, including the United States. If platforms decide to stay in the EU, they would be forced to scan the conversations of everyone in the bloc. If you’re not in the EU, but you chat with someone who is, then your privacy is compromised too. 

Another major danger is the introduction of mandatory age-verification systems for app stores and private messaging services. Though the Council claims these systems can be designed to “preserve privacy”, critics insist that the very concept is technologically unworkable. Age assessments inevitably rely on biometric and behavioral data, both of which require invasive data collection. Far from protecting children, these systems would increase the volume of sensitive personal information being stored and potentially exploited. 

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Requiring official identity documents for online verification would exclude millions of people who lack easy access to digital IDs or who won’t provide such sensitive documentation merely to use a messaging service. In practice, this would spell the end of anonymous communication online, forcing users to present ID or face scans simply to open an email or messaging account. Breyer has warned that such measures would be particularly disastrous for whistleblowers, journalists, political activists and others reliant on online anonymity. It would also push under-16s towards less safe, poorly regulated alternatives that lack encryption or basic safety protections. 

Ultimately, critics argue that mass surveillance is simply the wrong approach to combating child sexual exploitation. Scanning private messages does not stop the circulation of child abuse material. Platforms such as Facebook have used scanning technologies for years, yet the number of automated reports continues to rise. Moreover, mandatory scanning would still fail to detect perpetrators who distribute material through decentralized secret forums or via encrypted archives shared using only links and passwords — methods that scanning algorithms cannot successfully penetrate. The most effective strategy would be to delete known abuse material from online hosts, something Europol has repeatedly failed to do. 

Chat Control, in short, would do little to actually help victims of child sexual exploitation while harming everyone else. Every message would become subject to surveillance, without any judicial oversight, contrary to long-standing guarantees of private correspondence. There’s a legal question here too. The EU Court of Justice has previously ruled that general and automatic analysis of private communications violates fundamental rights, yet the EU is now poised to adopt legislation that contravenes this precedent. Once adopted, it could take years for a new judicial challenge to overturn it. 

The confidentiality of electronic communication — essential for personal privacy, business secrecy and democratic participation — would be sacrificed. Sensitive conversations could be read, analyzed, wrongly flagged or even misused, as past scandals involving intelligence officials and tech employees have shown. One of the most notorious cases of intelligence abuse came from the US National Security Agency, in which multiple NSA employees were caught using the agency’s powerful surveillance tools to spy on romantic partners and ex-lovers. Leaked documents have also shown that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ captured and stored images from Yahoo webcam chats, including millions of sexually explicit images of completely innocent users. There have also been several cases of Big Tech employees — from Google to Facebook — using internal tools to spy on unsuspecting users. 

Furthermore, secure encryption, a foundation of cybersecurity, would be compromised by introducing backdoors or client-side scanning tools that foreign intelligence services or criminal actors could exploit. At the same time, the responsibility for criminal investigations would shift from democratically accountable authorities to opaque corporate algorithms, with minimal transparency or oversight. 

Opponents therefore argue that the EU should instead adopt a fundamentally different approach: one that protects children without undermining fundamental rights. They propose ending the current voluntary scanning of private messages by US internet companies — restoring the principle that targeted surveillance requires a judicial warrant and must be limited to individuals reasonably suspected of wrongdoing — and maintain that secure end-to-end encryption, and the right to anonymous communication, must be preserved. 

Particularly worrying is the issue of function creep, the process by which a technology introduced for a narrowly defined purpose gradually expands to serve broader, and sometimes entirely different, purposes over time. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed in October 2023, obliges firms to develop child sexual abuse detection systems, even though the British government itself admits that such infrastructure is not yet technically available, creating legal authority awaiting technical capability. In the United States, “temporary” surveillance measures introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act became permanent, and indeed expanded in scope. Once a technological infrastructure for comprehensive online surveillance exists, it can easily be repurposed and is hard to dismantle. Technologies designed to detect harmful content can quickly be extended to political repression; examples from authoritarian states demonstrate how similar systems are used to identify and target dissidents. 

Breyer summarized this pattern starkly: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine. They promise child protection but punish our children and criminalize privacy.” The implications are ominous. Europe effectively stands on the threshold of building a machine that can see everything. Once constructed, it will serve not only the current political authorities — the idea of Ursula von der Leyen spying on everyone’s messages is disturbing enough — but whoever wields power next. With yet another vote approaching, the window to stop Chat Control is narrowing. 

What started out as a platform where users posted slightly rubbish pictures they thought were funny, sexy or cool, ended up introducing a new aesthetic pressure to the lives of Millennials. It made each user a public diarist, the director of a gallery entirely about themselves; it changed, perhaps forever, the amount of narcissism deemed acceptable in public forums. It birthed an entirely new category of bullshit job (“influencing”) and spewed the consumer junk they promoted — plastic phone charms, teas that paralyzed digestion, stacks of crappy eyeshadow palettes — into landfills via the bedrooms of young women. It gave that generation a reputation for vanity and trend-obsession which, millions of images of avocado toast later, it has yet to shake off.

Instagram also sped up young people’s deracination from political realities, becoming a forum for nonsense identity creeds and compulsive virtue signaling. In this, it doubled as a tool for shaming apostates: Instagram stories, launched in 2016, became peak-woke’s Place de la Concorde, swapping the guillotine for condemning posts. No celebrity cancellation scandal was complete until a heartfelt apology was coughed up here.

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When George Floyd was killed, everybody posted black squares on to their grids and vowed to host reading circles to unlearn unconscious biases (five years later, these initiatives have all, obviously, vanished). Many Gen Zs’ understanding of the gender debate is based entirely on the content of infographics — snippets from Judith Butler, misreadings of Simone de Beauvoir — and glib slogans which knowingly trampled nuance (“trans rights are human rights”). More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict has undergone this cartoonifying treatment: in the weeks after October 7, a woman I followed shared an infographic daydreaming about “queers” in the Gaza Strip, and the experiences Israel, in launching its offensive there, was denying them. Little matter that gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the territory. Conducted through the Instagram grid, politics became flattened and hopelessly factional. And for the first time, people incapable of defending their arguments at the pub were able to broadcast their ignorance without justification or debate: put simply, we heard so much more from those who knew so very much less. Given a platform, dullard perspectives flourished and political posers thrived.

These blights were prophesied by the French essayist Charles Baudelaire. In 1859 he wrote that if mechanical cameras were even slightly permitted into the category of traditional artworks they would defile creativity itself. The culprit was “the stupidity of the multitude which is its [photography’s] natural ally”; the spiritual purpose of art would dissolve on contact with a medium so inherently prolific, realistic and (shudder) democratic. Although his argument was limited to the scope of art, Baudelaire’s fears echo through the Instagram feed. The amateur photographers of his imagination were what he called “sun-worshippers”; hysterical yobbos dazzled by new tech instead of being, like he, chin-strokingly detached. Looking at the quality of what we see on social media, how right he was. The issue isn’t tech: it’s the immodesty of believing every one of us deserves to be a “creator”. The implication is horrifically snobbish (helpfully, this has never stopped me): not everyone should be an artist — nor a political pundit nor a poet, for that matter. Any technology that convinces us to broadcast as though we are is not to be trusted.

Later, Walter Benjamin would take the case against photography further by fretting that it endangered the “aura” of art — its singularity, its mythos. I feel that, grand though it is, his argument holds water as a template for our degraded social world. Instagram has made us know far too much about one another; what we know, moreover, is banal, bragging and useless in fostering intimacy. Closeness, friendship, true knowledge of another person; these are not what social media is for. At best, we are swapping avatars. The stupidity of the multitude has won out.

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In 1888, Kodak sold the first handheld camera. In the 1890s, amateur street photographers seemed to spring from every grubby corner: the “Kodak fiend” became a figure of anxiety among the middle classes, who feared being caught in private, undignified moments by a snap-happy rogue. So irritating was the possibility of being ambushed that in 1890 two attorneys wrote a furious article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. It said that “instantaneous photographs… have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”. This technology, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could destroy private life itself. It was also, as the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted, simply not decent. He believed that photography had introduced an unnatural self-consciousness in the lives of ordinary people: “In a moment the sitter becomes aware that the camera is merciless… the unconscious asymmetry of his features are laid bare… the world will see him as he is, or as the lens insists he is.” Of course, today blemishes can just be edited out, or be lost when one flattering image is posted out of 100 options. Social media gets us no closer to seeing ourselves “as we are”.

What a bunch of Luddites, you might think. But self-consciousness about cameras is something Wendell Holmes was right to bristle against. The presence of lenses attached to smartphones in almost every pocket has fundamentally changed how we move through the world. When anything and everything can be recorded in a moment, it’s not just personal vanity at stake; it’s privacy itself. Accustomed as we are to the fact that, in public life, everything we do might end up online, it seems quaint to think of a 19th-century office clerk suddenly feeling mortified about the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It seems crushingly naive to imagine anything about us being hidden from ourselves; a world that doesn’t continually show us our wonky teeth is prehistoric.

But 15 years after its inception, Instagram’s biggest crime is flattering us into inanity. Not only has it taught us that we must be our own personal archivists, but that these archives are interesting and important to both those who know us and, for the class of influencers, society at large. Instagram’s visual grammar has evolved over the years, from single, filtered images to carousels of images, videos, stories and the rest of it. All of this encourages us to agonize over how we present ourselves: what would “work” on a feed, what might accrue likes and shock and attention, and, increasingly, what makes us seem like we care about politics? And yet it’s worth remembering that most of us are, at times, boring, ugly and more concerned with the contents of our lunchboxes than the vagaries of far-away wars; though Instagram has supposedly encouraged us to be more “real” than ever, admitting these fundamental things remains too great a taboo.

Roan has described, how a stalker turned up at both her hotel room, and her parents’ house in Missouri. In another incident, a group of fans figured out her flight information and met her when she landed in Seattle, where one man was so enraged by her refusal to sign an autograph, airport police had to intervene. Another time, while out at a bar celebrating a friend’s birthday, she was grabbed and kissed by a fan.

If Roan weren’t famous, all these things would be obvious instances of harassment or assault. But she is famous, so — to the people who do them, at least — such actions exist in a grey area. She has sought her celebrity, and this is what celebrity consists of, so therefore she consented to this attention when she started releasing music.

She was discovered on YouTube at 17, signed to the label Atlantic, and then dropped in 2020 when lockdown stifled was should have been her big breakthrough. She spent two years rebuilding herself to where she is now: tickets for her British tour started at £20 when they were released in March; if you want to go to her London concert this weekend, it will now cost more than £600 on the resale market.

Those prices tell you something about the determination of Roan fans to get close to their icon. It’s a passion that, when it turns sour, tips into disturbing intrusion and harassment. This becomes even more disturbing when you realise that what she’s undergone is pretty normal for famous people. In April this year, for example, a woman was sentenced to prison and placed under a 10-year restraining order for stalking the singer Harry Styles, after sending him 8,000 cards in a one-month period.

More often, though, it’s a woman being harassed by a male obsessive. The “public woman” is, historically, a euphemism for prostitute: by making herself visible, the crude logic goes, she precludes herself from refusing any attention at all. That is witnessed by the list of female artists who have offered support to Roan, including Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX. The singer Mitski sent an email: “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members.”

As well as finding private support, Roan has made a public effort to set boundaries. In August, she issued a statement on Instagram urging fans to leave her alone when she was “not in work mode”: “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out — just because they’re expressing admiration.” She reiterated on TikTok.

One notable thing is that Roan’s pushback has, so far, been near-universally well-received. Yes, some individual fans have called her entitled or selfish for refusing to cater to them, but in the press, the reaction has been largely celebratory and supportive. That’s a shift from a generation ago, when fan intrusion was largely treated as a fair tax on the pursuit of public attention.

In 1999, a psychiatrist writing in the Guardian claimed that having a stalker was “the ultimate fashion accessory”. Three years earlier, the New York Times had chided Madonna for seeking special treatment after she asked to be excused from testifying in the presence of the man charged with stalking her: the headline read “Even You, Madonna”. (He was ultimately convicted, despite the defence’s efforts to claim Madonna was acting in the courtroom as she acted on screen.)

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In the 2000s, that attitude was enthusiastically embraced by a voracious celebrity gossip culture. Gawker — the now-defunct New York gossip blog — was even shameless enough to have a feature called “Gawker Stalker”, reporting live sightings of celebrities around the city. After the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel attacked the website over this, Gawker went on the offensive in a luridly self-righteous post.

“Stalker-style treatment is a description of public people’s lives in public, and is also treatment that anyone with any kind of media or online presence […] is now subject to,” it read. “The only difference is that celebrities are protected somewhat from these verbal attacks by ‘piles of money.’” In other words, celebrities are only being treated the same as everyone else, and even if they aren’t, their celebrity status itself precludes them from sympathy.

Any journalist suggesting in the same way today that Roan is somehow asking for it or too privileged to be affected by the behaviour would have a hard time, largely because social media has given artists a direct line to their own fandoms — and those fandoms a direct line to anyone who criticises their heroes. And Roan’s connection to her fans is unusually tight, even in these intensely parasocial times. When she returned to Missouri to rebuild herself, it wasn’t her songs she put the most effort into: it was building her presence on TikTok.

With no label to push her, she had to build her own following; and because her songs and her act focus on ideas of sexuality, self-discovery and release from repression, that following has bonded to her tightly. For many fans, her work has helped them to uncover and express the most intimate truths about themselves. She told the Face: “I can’t read my DMs anymore, because I cry so much. But when people are like, ​‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ — I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment.”

This is emotionally powerful. But it’s also the intractable paradox of fame in a social media era. You become successful by cultivating closeness with your audience; from that closeness, some people are going to extrapolate a relationship that extends further than is healthy. Roan’s fans believe that, through her work, they have found the truest version of themselves.

From there, it is only a short step to imagining that they also know the truest version of her, and that if they could only attract her attention, she’d recognise the bond they share.

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It’s telling that one of the fan behaviours she’s announced she will no longer tolerate is people trying to attract her attention by shouting her birth name (Chappell Roan is a stage name): another manifestation of the fantasy that they know her secret self. The irony is that her act draws heavily on drag, an art form that is all about concealment in plain sight. For Roan, her elaborate costumes and mask-like makeup act as a division between her public and private selves. For the extreme and obsessive fans, this simply represents a challenge to be overcome: an act of coquetry inspiring them to up their pursuit.

Clearly, it is untenable for anyone to live with the demands placed on Roan by her most obsessive fans. But it is also impossible to see how her reasonable need for privacy can be balanced with being the kind of celebrity to whom fans send highly personal messages about their own coming out story. At the moment, Roan’s best defence against the cadre of over-proprietorial fans is a cadre of slightly less proprietorial fans who are at least responsive to her requests about boundaries. It is a choice between two different ways of being treated as a possession, one slightly less destructive than the other.

Fame is not power — or at least, it is not only power. Fame is the experience of being owned by millions of different people, each of whom is certain that their small, splintered version of you is more true than the version of you anyone else could have; each of whom believes that their love entitles them to be loved in return. The only way to survive is to bury the “real you” out of reach and let people pour their devotion into a person who doesn’t really exist. Otherwise, everyone ends up like Orpheus: annihilated by those who claim to care the most.

The natural extension of all of this euphoria has become the need to prove that you’ve been immunised. And so the concept of the “vaccine passport” has been born; a digital document or smart phone app, a magic ticket that will allow you to hop on a plane, go to the theatre or pop to the pub.

Only last week, after facing pressure from countries reliant on summer tourism – including Greece, Italy and Spain — European leaders confirmed their intention to create an EU-wide vaccine certification scheme that would record people who had received approved jabs. “Everyone agreed that we need a digital vaccination certificate,” Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said after a virtual summit. “This will make travelling within the EU possible and could pave the way for further travel from third countries into the EU.”

It’s hardly surprising, then, that an array of British start-up companies is now jostling to produce a bewildering collection of “travel passes”, “immunity certificates” and “health passports”. But what, exactly, are they? And how will they work?

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First, it is important to remember that proof-of-vaccination documents are nothing new. Seasoned travellers have long been required to have certain inoculations before being granted access to some countries. These have, however, never existed in the context of a pandemic; so, in the past, if you had not had a jab against yellow fever, then you would have been barred from only a handful of countries — if you haven’t had a Covid vaccination, the effect on your travel plans could be much more profound.

The vaccination passports currently being mooted are broadly divided into two types: those intended for international travel and those you might be required to show if you wanted to access an office or entertainment venue — though the best solution (if, indeed, you regard such passports as a “solution” at all) would be for a vaccine passport to be recognised both by national border officials and pub bouncers.

Whatever their purpose, all these documents and passports do have one thing in common: they provide verification of a person’s identity — usually through biometrics or facial recognition — as well as up-to-date access to medical records showing their vaccinations, boosters and so on. Some also record whether a person is positive for antibodies, indicating that they have already had Covid-19.

In the UK, it’s worth noting that this path was not always inevitable. In fact, a succession of ministers initially said vaccine passports were not being considered by the government. But, with the prospect of lockdown being lifted now on the horizon, they have rowed back in the past couple of weeks. Indeed, in spite of the government’s initial reticence, almost half a million pounds in grants had already been awarded to eight companies working on variations of vaccine passports before Johnson’s “roadmap” was announced.

Among them is Logifect, a “global digital health solutions provider” which has received £37,000 to help develop a smartphone app to confirm immunity. Before the pandemic, Logifect was already involved in what it described as “the next generation of digital health”, which would enable individuals to access their medical records, receive healthcare advice and manage medical devices from their smartphones.

Its immunity passport, says Commercial Director Sean Power, would be a spin-off of that. First you would download its app to your smartphone. Using your camera within the app, you would be asked for a scan of your passport or driving licence, and then to have your picture taken for comparison and verification. Then, when you needed to demonstrate that your vaccines were up to date, you would open the app and give permission for your vaccine record to be accessed and for a QR code to be produced. This could then be read by the checker’s smart device, which would display a message with your photo confirming your vaccine status.

“Your picture links you to that record — your name doesn’t even appear,” says Power. “The communication is fully encrypted at both ends for complete security and then everything is deleted in seconds.

“We see this as a way of making a positive contribution to the community, with our costs being covered by a small fee — probably pennies — to the venue or authority that requests the information. It would cost the user nothing.”

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Meanwhile, iProov, a biometrics ID company that lists the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK Home Office as clients, and cybersecurity firm Mvine, which has already worked on projects with the Cabinet Office and NHS, have been given a joint £75,000 grant to develop an app that would perform a similar task to Logifect’s.

iProov’s founder and CEO Andrew Bud tells me their system involves the creation of a certificate to demonstrate that you have been vaccinated. They have developed a number of options, some of which will need the involvement of the Department of Health.

Currently, vaccination records are held by the National Immunisation Management System, which is run by Public Health England, Scotland and Wales independently of the NHS, and within GP surgery patient records. The iProov/Mvine system proposes storing these vaccination records using cloud technology, so they are neither held on your phone nor within existing NHS record systems.

“One of the defining features of the Mvine/iProov system is that it is designed for privacy,” says Bud. “It doesn’t require a name or address or date of birth or National Insurance number or any other irrelevant data. Our system is designed to associate the existence of a valid vaccine certificate with a face.”

Other companies that have received grants include: EAS Technologies (£137,877), which is focusing on vaccine verification for sporting events; the Hub Company (£49,448), which features PayPal and IBM among its clients; Enduring Net (£49,678), which says it usually focuses on technology “in humanitarian work”; and Verifiable Credentials (£89,000), which is planning to create “Covid-19 certificates” that cannot be forged.

But they are not only runners in this race. In fact, the UK Government is undertaking a three-month review of “vaccine passport” technology and may even consider repurposing the pre-existing NHS app — separate to its track and trace app — which gives people access to their medical records.

However, according to Phil Booth, co-ordinator of medConfidential, a campaign group promoting best practice in safeguarding the confidentiality of medical records, this would likely be unpopular among NHS staff.

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“It would essentially turn the NHS into a clearing house for information requested by the private sector,” he says. “This would find great resistance among those responsible for NHS Login [the online portal that patients can use to access a host of services and see their GP medical records]. Being forced to be a certification authority in the midst of all their other pandemic work would be a massive drain on resources and, frankly, a distraction.”

Moreover, Booth says, it is unclear what the purpose of all this technology would be: “It would be impossible for the government to partner up with private companies to produce vaccine passports until everybody had had the offer of a vaccine — otherwise requiring a passport to get through everyday life would be discriminatory.

“But the vaccine take up is so great — about 90 per cent in the higher age groups — that by the time everybody has been offered one, we will probably have reached herd immunity. So, what’s the point of having a passport that will get you into a pub in those circumstances?”

Still, that hasn’t deterred countries across the world from investing in this technology. Israel was one of the first, followed by Greece, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Norway. None of these countries has said that foreign internationals without proof of vaccination would be refused entry, but instead would be subject to other — more laborious and time-consuming — testing or quarantine regimes.

Domestically, Israel is the only country to have vaccinated enough people to have a system that is already functioning. About half of its 9.3 million citizens have received the two jabs required to qualify for a “green pass” that they can display using a Health Ministry app on their phones — people with such passes are already being granted access to restaurants, shops and theatres.

Airlines, too, are getting in on the act, courtesy of the pre-existing International Air Transport Association (IATA) Travel Pass app. This provides information to travellers on the Covid requirements of the country they are travelling to, tells them where they can get tested if required, enables labs to send results directly to passengers, and, crucially, provides for the creation of a digital vaccination record once governments make them available.

Among those already trialling aspects of it are Singapore Airlines, Etihad, RwandAir, Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Air New Zealand. Moreover, on top of all these initiatives is a whole host of private sector travel and vaccination record schemes, among them IBM’s Digital Health Pass, Daon’s Verifly (currently being trialled by BA and American Airlines) and Microsoft’s Vaccination Credential Initiative.

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But with the creation of so many disparate apps and vaccination confirmation systems, surely we will need some kind of international co-ordination for them to be practicable. And there is currently only one body that has an internationally-recognised proof-of-vaccination scheme — the World Health Organisation’s Yellow Card. Indeed, it increasingly seems that the WHO will be called upon to provide a solution to all this apparent chaos.

Already it has teamed up with Estonia — arguably the country with the world’s most efficient joined-up governmental IT architecture — to come up with a system that would enable national “vaccine passport” solutions to work in an international setting.

At the forefront of this partnership is Marten Kaevats, National Digital Adviser to the Estonian government and a member of the WHO’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group. He says no new technology would be needed for an international system to work. Instead, building up trust among nations, so that they can rely on the information provided by others, would be paramount.

“We currently see most of the different governments deploying various sorts of their own technologies,” he tells me. “In order for these technologies to be able to co-operate with each other, we need to agree upon common global standards and principles.”

The WHO has set up a Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group in order to achieve this. But, says Kaveats, “the WHO doesn’t currently have a mandate to become the global anchor of trust for cross-border health data services. It could be given that at the end of May when the World Health Assembly [the decision-making body of the WHO] next convenes.”

With the threat of other Coronavirus variants — or entirely new viruses and pandemics — continuing to loom over us, it certainly seems only a matter before an international solution such as the WHO’s is devised. In the meantime, the race for a vaccine may be over. But the race to create vaccine passports has only just begun.

Welcome to New London, we have three rules:
No privacy
No family
No monogamy

Everyone is very happy.

Or are they? 80 years on, few viewers will be unaware that, for the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s New London, true happiness is far from assured. In this totalitarian society, babies are all born outside of the human body in a state-controlled  ‘hatchery’, and a biological caste system determines the social role individuals are permitted to play: Alphas are leaders; Betas are elite workers; Gammas and Deltas are servants; and Epsilons form a drone-like underclass. All are kept docile through the ready availability of pleasure: endless parties, casual sex, an immersive form of cinema called the ‘feelies’, and the regular administration of the drug soma, available in pill or liquid form.

In this version, the protagonist Bernard Marx doesn’t work at the Central London Hatchery, but is instead employed as a soma peddler for the Bureau of Stability. His job is to keep everyone in a consistent state of contentment, topping up their soma dose as necessary with pretty multicoloured pills (“how about a yellow?”). Citizens carry with them a clicking soma dispenser, the same shape and size as a fountain pen.

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The prop allows the filmmakers to signal characters’ emotional distress with canny simplicity. Social anxiety? Click. Interpersonal conflict? Click. When the restless Bernard gets into an argument on a bus with a young Alpha, the other passengers are left disconcerted, unsure how to respond to an unusual display of social tension. Bernard the candy man dutifully proceeds around the bus, dropping pills into their trembling hands: click, click, click.

The true drama begins when Bernard and his sexpot Beta companion Lenina take a rocket across the Atlantic and return with John the Savage, a man born to New London parents, but raised in the ‘Savage Lands’. More like an Indian reservation in the novel, the Savage Lands are here cleverly reimagined as a theme park devoted to 21^st Century American decline. New London visitors load onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison), the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a reenactment of what is presented as the most important event in the savages’ calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a barbed attack on late capitalism on primetime TV.  A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included “jealousy, competition, greed, and strife.” She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, while its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the 26th century could seem when set beside the 21st.

Unlike the other properly “conditioned” characters, John the Savage is burdened by unrestrained and unmedicated human emotion. He gets jealous, he hits people, he smashes things, and he feels grief and sorrow. His entry into New London proves destabilising because, for all of its emotional sterility, the restrictions placed on this society do work, in that they have managed to successfully rid themselves of conflict.

The lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; the lack of family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and the lack of monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens pay for all this stability is an emptiness that they find hard to put into words: a longing for meaning that soma can’t touch. And although we don’t see New London citizens pining especially for children, religion, or family – all of which are banned by the state – they do pine terribly for monogamous love, and sometimes attempt it, despite the state’s best efforts to stop them. With John the Savage on the scene, trouble is inevitable.

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Certain elements of the story been emphasised — and others down-played — for a 2020 audience. Of course, we have our Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, all carrying out their various allocated jobs. But the new series represents the hierarchy as just a more explicit version of our existing class structure. The characters of this adaptation are more rebellious than those in the novel, and we see little evidence that they are innately biologically suited to their positions.

The series doesn’t engage with Huxley’s much more disturbing vision, in which people really are designed for either drudge or leadership, and really won’t resist, no matter how lowly their status. “We like cleaning up” chant the epsilons in the 2020 adaption, but we know they don’t really mean it. In the 1932 novel, they actually do. And at a time when technologies like CRISPR gene editing bring Huxley’s dystopia uncomfortably close to reality, it is curious to see how little interest the filmmakers take in this theme.

Instead, the element of the novel that’s drawn out – and effectively – is the numbing consequences of endless pleasure. In 1932, the culture of casual sex that Huxley described was a long way from reality in a Britain in which contraception was still primitive and abortion criminalised, meaning that sex and reproduction remained inseparable. Even elite eccentrics like the Bloomsbury Set, who famously “lived in squares and loved in triangles”, weren’t able to have truly consequence-free sex, given how many illegitimate children they produced.

But in Brave New World, Huxley had the foresight to imagine a society in which sex could be just one more consumable product among a host of other delights. The citizens of New London love novelty: no one wears the same outfit twice, new trends flash and fizzle within a matter of days, and sexual partners are just one more source of fleeting excitement, to be immediately forgotten.

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The censors who attempted to ban the novel soon after its publication could hardly have imagined that sections of the 21^st century elite would soon be openly enjoying soma-infused orgies and proudly tearing down bourgeois sexual norms, just like the Alphas and Betas of Brave New World. As Emily Chang puts it in a Vanity Fair piece on Silicon Valley sex and drugs parties:

“Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

Media references to Brave New World are often misapplied, typically used to refer to the arrival of new reproductive technologies. But what’s interesting about Huxley’s story is not so much the prospect of babies grown in bottles — still a long way off — but instead the far more immediate prospect of a population that has been stupefied by limbic capitalism: that is, the skilfully designed and addictive forms of entertainment that drip-feed us dopamine.

Porn, junk food, celebrity media, gambling, gaming, smoking, opioids: all of these products tap into our longing for nourishment, excitement, and pleasure, but do so while draining the consumer of health, happiness, and – most importantly – money. If there’s one thing that Huxley got wrong, it was in assuming that soma would need to be coercively administered by the state. As it turns out, private corporations are more than up to the job.

In his delightfully titled 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman recognised Huxley’s prescience:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

In this adaptation, a designer of New London’s social structure speaks at one point of the ease with which the population were persuaded to adopt her new regime. These people embraced passivity, irrelevance, and trivia because they couldn’t bear to experience normal human emotion: “they would have done anything to avoid those agonising moments when there’s nowhere else to look but inside.” The designer offered consumers short-term pleasure over long-term happiness. Centuries later, and far too late, she regrets what she’s done.

Except, if you knew about the #FreeBritney campaign, this felt like something else. Not a tech-flavoured parable about the commoditising effects of the pop industry, but a straight-up retelling of a story about Britney Spears, who for the past 12 years has had no legal control over her life while her family has made every decision for her. In 2008, Britney — who by then had been shockingly famous for a decade, since the release of “… Baby One More Time” — had a very public breakdown. She shaved her head. She attacked the paparazzi. She lost custody of her children for a time. She was taken into hospital strapped to a gurney, and all this was harrowingly documented by the eager press.

Around this time, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the World Service, caught the latest update on the Britney situation, and semi-consciously decided that the first thing I would do the next morning would be to write Britney a letter inviting her to stay with me. She just needed someone to look out for her for a bit, and boy am I good at looking out for Britney, who I’ve loved since the first time I saw the “Baby” video. I put a poster of Britney in her teenage bedroom in my own teenage bedroom and had to, excruciatingly, un-out myself when this led everyone to assume I was mostly into girls.

No pop star has ever arrived with such a perfect statement of what they are, and what they mean. Here’s the former Disney Mousketeer, now 16, surrounded by a pounding Max Martin production, big-eyed in school uniform and moaning out every word, absolutely desperate with desire — with love, because Britney’s S&M-skirting invitation to hit her (figuratively!) one more time is all directed at one baby. And of course, we all knew she was a virgin. That was part of the sell. She had to be in on it, didn’t she?

Maybe my 17-year-old self was making some generous assumptions about how far Britney was directing this, but don’t teenage girls always make generous assumptions about their command over the world? Anyway, the Britney template was established: half unstoppable purpose (hit me!), half hopeless supplication (when I’m not with you I lose my mind!). On top of this, by her second album, the irresistible phoniness of this confection was being acknowledged in songs like “Lucky”, a ballad about a “Hollywood girl” who’s “lost in an image, in a dream.” She had to be in on it. Didn’t she?

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The best of Britney’s fame songs is probably “Piece of Me”, which was released in November 2007. In it, Britney — by then well into her “hot mess” era, with two broken marriages and one abortive rehab stint — goes in on her tabloid image. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17… Mrs She’s Too Big, Now She’s Too Thin,” she chants. The refrain is classic Britney, part come-on and part threat: “You wanna piece of me?” It sounded like someone throwing her own coverage back in the media’s face and taking charge.

A few months later, she was strapped to that gurney and in charge of nothing. From that point, amid rumours of mental illness and substance abuse, she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father control over essentially her entire life — her finances, as well as her physical and mental health. In the public account of the Britney story, this is where the show got back on the road. Head shaving: out. In: mammothly profitable Las Vegas residencies. I saw the touring version in Scarborough, in 2018, and God she was good when she was performing.

When she wasn’t in motion, though, she seemed a little vacant, and I’m not fully sure she knew she was in Scarborough (the best we got was a “Hello UK!”). This is where a second version of the Britney story cuts in, the one that’s been assembled by supposition and guesswork. This is the version the #FreeBritney campaign is working to. For them, Britney, like fictional Ashley O in Black Mirror, has been wholly co-opted by the people around her — her family — who they believe are exploiting her for maximum financial gain. The ACLU has even offered to support her in challenging the conservatorship arrangement. Her latest attempt to remove her father from her affairs was just deferred by a court till 2021.

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What’s actually going on with Britney is difficult to say, because the hearings on her conservatorship are all closed, and her family deny any charge of acting against Britney’s best interests. Fans have been left picking over her social media for clues, which is, it’s fair to say, opaque. But even the most generous guess at what’s happening leaves a bad taste. If this is a woman who really is incompetent to run her own life, and has to be overseen in every particular by her guardians, why was I squealing away in the stands watching her do hot Thatcherite self-determination anthem “Work Bitch”?

Being a hypocrite, I guess. Being a fan. Getting my piece of her. Other artists play off their persona and their private lives in their music: Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — in fact, all the most exciting pop stars since Britney have followed her in making their music primarily a record of their relationship to fame. But with Britney, it seems as though the image long ago outran the woman underneath it, and even the supporters who want to free her still want her to be their Britney.

The most heartbreakingly implausible bit of that Black Mirror is that the pop star character gets her liberation, because it’s hard to see Britney’s way out. If she succeeds in cutting her father from the conservatorship — even if she’s eventually deemed too competent to be released from it entirely — what does freedom look like for someone whose entire adult life has been spent being famous for being Britney Spears? The most constricting part of celebrity isn’t the people who hate you: it’s the people who think they love you, and who think that love means they own you.

The Lib Dems have since disappeared into irrelevance. The lib Cons are still around — and include in their number our current Prime Minister. But could the man who buried David Cameron’s premiership be the one to resurrect ID cards?

There’s no point rehashing the arguments made in the early 2000s. This is an issue in which the case for and against is prone to exaggeration. The fact is that a liberal democracy can have compulsory ID cards without sliding into dictatorship — or not have them and avoid anarchy. There are plenty of examples of both scenarios.

So, instead of having the old argument, let’s have a new one. I’ve always been instinctively opposed to ID cards, but looking at the underlying dynamics of the issue, 2020 looks very different from 2010. The most obvious — and recent — of game-changing developments is the Covid crisis. The future is pathogenic now. Even if there’s no second wave, we cannot assume a new normal in which pandemic disease risk isn’t a major policy consideration.

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Lockdown has restricted our freedoms in ways that make the concerns of the ID card debate look trivial. We’re now presented with plausible — indeed, likely — scenarios in which our freedom of movement and association depends on us being able to produce documented facts about ourselves: quarantine certificates; vaccination records; immunity status; test, trace and tracking data.

In terms of international travel some of this is already in force — with passports serving as the primary means of proving ID. How long before ID cards serve a parallel function as ‘internal passports’? It’s a disturbing concept, but as an alternative to general lockdown, it may be the least worst option.

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Another game-changing development is new technology. Back in 2010 we hadn’t yet woken up to the full implications of social media. We didn’t realise just how much the tech companies knew about us. A lot of people weren’t even using smartphones yet. In 2020, we still don’t know the whole story, but we’ve come to accept a significant degree of electronic surveillance in our everyday lives. Thus the idea of being easily identified doesn’t seem so foreign anymore, not when we’re identified every time we go online to shop, socialise and express our opinions.

Of course, the information flows that would be enabled through ID cards would be controlled by the state — and the state, unlike Facebook or Google, has the power to arrest and imprison you. So, the stakes are higher. But, then again, if the authorities want to track your movements and behaviour, they already can.

The last ten years have seen rapid advances across a variety of surveillance technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and even heartbeat recognition. The CCTV network is ever expanding in scope and sophistication and is supplemented by drones and other mobile forms of image capture. And that’s just one form of big data collected by the various arms of the state.

In short, if you’re leading any sort of normal life, the authorities don’t need you to carry around an ID card in order to identify you.

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Indeed, the bigger risk may lie in not being identified. This was demonstrated by the Windrush Scandal — in which people who had immigrated to this country from the Caribbean were required to prove to the authorities that they’d been legally resident in the UK. For the Windrush generation who arrived before legal immigration was documented in the way it is now, this was difficult to do. Shamefully, longstanding UK residents were deported because they were unable to assemble the documentary evidence that wasn’t there — or, at least, wasn’t accessible. The scandal was in fact two scandals: first and foremost the inhumanity of plunging innocent people into a Kafkaesque nightmare; but also that it should be so hard to prove the basic facts of your own life.

A future full of big data will be a hyper-bureaucratic future. In our dealings with both the state and private corporations it is, therefore, vital that we have some consistent hold over the way our identities are recorded and recognised. ID cards could provide that control — a key that grants us access to what we need to know and what we want others to know about us. There’s no guarantee that the introduction of such a system would guarantee our rights, but it would be an opportunity to fight for them.

*

We also need to think about the people who slip through the cracks of the system — living undocumented, unofficial lives unsupported and unprotected by the authorities. Only a small minority of these will be citizens who freely choose an ‘off-grid’ existence — a choice that should be respected. The great majority, though, will be vulnerable adults and children, many of them illegal immigrants, some of them trafficked against their will — and all of them at risk of exploitation. A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice estimates that there may be 100,000 or more victims of modern slavery in Britain alone.

We make things easy for this vile trade by tolerating, even celebrating, a bargain basement labour market — the legal and illegal components of which shade into one another. This is further enabled by a context in which it’s still possible for people to live and work without needing to prove who they are — and without their employers and landlords having to confirm those identities. A robust ID card system that made this simple and straightforward — but also inescapable — would be a severe blow to the modern slavers, people smugglers, slum landlords and other exploiters who depend on the anonymity of those they exploit.

Of course, no such system can be foolproof, nor would it be completely free of inconvenience for law abiding citizens. However, the same can be said of our passports system. Ultimately, it is a question of comparing these potential harms against the consequences of the status quo — in which we’re neither able to fully control our borders nor to prevent the everyday violation of basic human rights.

*

What about the practical arrangements? One of the reasons why there was such resistance to New Labour’s ID cards policy was the lack of confidence in the government’s ability to manage IT projects. Indeed, the decade was marked by a series of fiascos — including one occasion when two CDs containing confidential child benefit data on 25 million people got lost in the post. Yes, really. The ensuing outrage was probably what doomed the ID policy before it was even implemented.

Is there any reason why we should have any more confidence in government today? The faltering progress on the promised test-and-trace app isn’t exactly encouraging. However, there’s no reason why governments can’t deliver ambitious IT projects. Singapore and Taiwan have impressed the world with their use of tech to control the spread of Covid. As it happens, both countries also have compulsory ID card systems. Another interesting model is Estonia, a world leader in providing online government services. Estonians can even vote in national elections online. And that’s despite the country being under constant cyber-attack. 

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So if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, the fact is that we can. Any ID card system could be based on systems that have been successfully and reliably computerised. The passports system is the obvious example and an appropriate one if ID cards are re-introduced as means of exempting individuals from future lockdown restrictions. 

If HMG ever persuades the British people to accept ID cards it must be in the service of our overall convenience, not theirs. Every ID card should come as part of a package that also includes a free passport and, for those suitably qualified, a free driving license too. As in Estonia, it should provide strong authentication for access to online government services and participating private sector websites. And even if we don’t immediately follow the Estonian example of internet-based voting, ID cards could be used to provide a robust system of confirming identity for voting by post and at polling stations. 

*

Then there’s the question of electronic cash. Thanks to innovations like contactless payments and online retail we’re using less physical cash than ever. Covid has only accelerated the decline of notes and coins, whose circulation through so many hands makes them a potential vector of disease. But to do without them altogether would require some form of e-cash — that is, not a credit or debit card, but a card that carries a digital currency for making instant, frictionless payments. In other words, something like an Oyster Card, but which could be used anywhere.

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The big tech companies smell an opportunity. Some of them, like Facebook with its Libra project, are already on the case. But do we really want private companies running the digital currencies of the future? Or do we want one of the very oldest functions of government to stay in public hands? Writing in The Guardian, the economist Kenneth Rogoff suggests one possible way forward:

“The most radical approach would be a dominant retail central-bank currency which allows consumers to hold accounts directly at the central bank. This could have some great advantages, such as guaranteeing financial inclusion and snuffing out bank runs.”

It doesn’t have to go quite that far, but if currencies do go fully digital then making sure that everyone has access to the means of exchange becomes absolutely essential. At the very least, government needs to provide some form of guaranteed basic account. But that, of course, raises the question of identification. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have our electronic cash on the same piece of plastic as our ID, but the two would have to be linked in some way.

*

William Gibson once said that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”. Well, a future in which everyone is subject to constant, electronic, centralised identification is certainly on its way.

The things that were decentralised — the little bits of information we give away through our relationships with friends, family, strangers, suppliers, customers and the agencies of the state — are inexorably coming together. But that process of centralisation is not evenly distributed. It privileges the most powerful organisations and is taking place away from public scrutiny.

ID cards might just be our best chance to drag the centralisation of our data — our very identities — into the light. It’s not a question of whether we’ll be ID’d in every moment of our lives, but how.

Sound too good to be true?

Other countries are already using contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is also used in sexually transmitted infections, where previous partners may be contacted with advice to get themselves a test. But whereas we tend to remember our sexual partners, we tend not to remember everyone who shared our train carriage or served us in a shop several days before we had symptoms. That’s where technology could help.

I write constantly about the threat to privacy of letting our smartphones share data that reveals where we go, what we do, and who shares our personal space. And although these are exceptional circumstances, we should not stop valuing our privacy. Emergency measures have a habit of becoming the new normal. And information about who we’ve been close to could be of interest to all sorts of people, from blackmailers to over-enthusiastic police officers enforcing their own interpretation of “necessary activities”.

Let’s compare some of the contact-tracing technology already in use, to see how the UK could avoid the pitfalls while harnessing our phones to battle the virus.

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The Chinese app, AliPay HealthCode, raises some red flags. It assigns users a unique QR code which displays red, yellow or green, indicating your health status, and which determines how much freedom of movement you’re permitted. How that risk category is calculated remains opaque, though it uses proximity to known infected individuals or hotspot locations in that calculation. It sends your identity and location directly to a server accessible by the police, who can use it to enforce the quarantine demanded by your colour status. Use of the app is not compulsory, but even local movement may be impossible without it.

South Korea uses existing sources of data when tracing contacts, rather than a specific app (though they do have an optional app to monitor infected people in mandatory quarantine). They use interviews, supplemented with CCTV footage, smartphone location data, and even credit card records, to reconstruct an individual’s pre-diagnosis activities. They have been criticised for making public the locations and activities where others may have been infected, which has led to individuals being publicly identified, and deterred others from getting tested.

Israel has already allowed its internal security agency, Shin Bet, to access cellphone geolocation data, and that can now be used for coronavirus tracking. Cellphone users who have been close to known infected individuals may receive text messages telling them to self-isolate. However, Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians criticised the project, asking why no health professionals were involved in designing it. The Ministry of Health then launched a location-based app, Hamagen, on an opt-in basis, also using GPS data.

Singapore’s TraceTogether app supplements interview-based contact-tracing in a similar way to South Korea’s. TraceTogether doesn’t collect data on where you have been, because it only wants to identify who has been within infectible range. To do this, it uses Bluetooth.

Where geolocation-based apps use the cellphone’s GPS function, and its connections to the nearest cellphone towers, Bluetooth exchanges signals, not with a cellphone network, via a tower, but with other Bluetooth-enabled devices within a few metres.

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Good news if you want to identify people at risk from the cellphone’s infectious owner, without handing over to a central database lots of personal data about where you were. All the app needs is Bluetooth’s Relative Signal Strength Indicator readings to approximate how close you were to another device, and for how long.

As the app’s ‘How Does TraceTogether Work?’ page puts it: “This proximity and duration information is stored on one’s phone for 21 days on a rolling basis – anything beyond that would be deleted. No location data is collected.” The data stays on each person’s phone unless they test positive for Covid-19, in which case they’re asked to hand it over to Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH).

The MOH works with them to trace their contacts for the previous 14 days. There’s a legal requirement to help MOH map recent activities if requested, including producing other data held on your phone in other apps. But it’s not compulsory to use TraceTogether at all.

Several other countries are introducing apps modelled on this app: the pandemic has spurred a worldwide rush of innovation and technical experimentation.

Most of us would welcome the chance to contain the spread of the virus without having to stay locked down until a vaccine arrives. But do we have to trade our privacy by turning everyone’s phone into a tracking device? Perhaps not.

More than 25 scientists across eight European universities decided that, rather than wait for others to produce bad apps, they would write their own. Or at least, write the basic code that others could use, and make it freely available. And the result was DP-3T.

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Like Singapore’s TraceTogether, DP-3T is designed around Bluetooth’s capacity for device-to-device communication. Like TraceTogether, it transmits and receives ID codes that can later be used to reconstruct whether a sick person has been close enough to infect you. But it has some important refinements that mean no centralised body ever needs to know who has been close to whom.

Instead of transmitting codes that can be linked back to the person using the app, a DP-3T app transmits a random jumble of letters and numbers that changes regularly. Other devices receiving the codes won’t even know if this is the same device as yesterday, which is an important layer of protection for anonymity. Each device running the app will store all the codes sent and received.

If one person does get a diagnosis of Covid-19, they get a passcode from the healthcare professional making the diagnosis, which allows them (just once) to upload their “sent” codes from the pre-symptomatic contagious period to a database. This gives the database no information about the patient’s identity, location, or anything else, just the codes transmitted during the relevant period.

All the other phones running the app have access to the database of codes, but only to cross check against the codes in their own “received” file. The app can do this regularly and automatically, and alert the user if the level of exposure means they should self-quarantine, or get tested.

Everyone keeps control of their own data, the centralised database contains only anonymous codes from infected people, and nobody has the whole picture. It is possible to have both contact tracing and privacy.

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Is this the basis for the NHSX app being developed, which is also designed to use Bluetooth to track proximity?

Probably not.

“All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research,” according to Hancock’s announcement, “and we won’t hold it any longer than is needed.” But this implies that data from the app will be uploaded to a central database, where it can be used for other purposes. The fact the government felt the need to say that the police would not have access to the data suggests that it won’t be anonymous.

The public’s appetite to put the app on their phones will be reduced even further by the revelation that NHSX has teamed up with Palantir, a data-processing giant that works with the CIA (which part funds it). Palantir will be processing, not controlling the data, but our government has a patchy record on transparency over data retention and use.

However, a few developments over Easter weekend could force NHSX to radically rethink their project.

On Good Friday, Apple and Google released a joint statement, in itself a sign of the unprecedented times we are living in. They plan to design contact-tracing technology, either apps or the digital infrastructure on which apps can be built, which looks very like the DP-3T model. The two tech giants also announced another change that sounds like a minor technical detail, but could be more significant for the NHSX app. It concerns the way Bluetooth runs on Apple, and newer Android, devices.

When I asked a Singaporean friend about the TraceTogether App, he told me, “It’s a pain to use,” because it needs Bluetooth to be running all the time. But because Bluetooth is a digital blabbermouth, dishing out your data to any local device that wants to know, Apple devices don’t allow it to run in the background while you’re doing anything else, or while your phone is locked. Google’s newer Android systems run along the same lines.

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This means that if you want the TraceTogether app to work “you have to leave it on and … ‘upside down’ in your pocket to go into Low Power mode,” says my Singaporean app user,  “but of course everything’s haywire if you leave your phone unlocked in your pocket as you walk around!” At best, you pocket-dial your ex. At worst, a pickpocket has access to your entire life.

Dilemma for Google, and especially for Apple. It makes a big point of privacy, and of keeping your data on your device instead of on somebody else’s database. Could it allow Bluetooth to run when the app is not active, but for approved Covid-19 apps only?

This in effect, is what it has said it will do. But its definition of approved Covid-19 apps is drawn more narrowly than many expected. In fact, Apple devices will only allow Bluetooth to run in the background for more privacy-friendly, decentralised contact tracing systems, like DP-3T.

The solution to the Bluetooth privacy problem is that the exchanging and storing of randomly generated codes will happen, not in an app, but securely within the operating system. Data will leave the device only for explicitly authorised uploading to an approved database. The only other interactions possible with external databases will be queries about matching numbers. The app could potentially export any risk scores it has calculated for you, but not the codes sent and received by Bluetooth.

It sounds like a minor detail. But it could be a big spanner in the works for the NHSX app, if it doesn’t conform to that decentralised model. The app wouldn’t work with the phone locked or while you are using it for anything else. This inconvenience has been a big barrier to uptake in Singapore, where few people are using it, certainly fewer than the 60% of the population that public health experts have estimated as the minimum needed to make it work.

All these developments will have taken the NHSX project by surprise. It now faces a choice between carrying on with an app that’s less convenient to use, and that fewer people will trust, or starting again with a different model, delaying rollout, and denying them access to data that could be useful for research and for planning.

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In the long run, however, adopting the DP-3T model has huge advantages. It makes it easier for lots of us to download and run an app, without worrying about whether we’re releasing data to big corporations and government bodies to use for other purposes. It avoids setting precedents for centralised databases of who we spend time with. And it’s the foundation for internationally-compatible anti-Covid-19 digital solutions, which we may need for some time to come.

So, quick redesign, and Matt Hancock can roll out the app and get the UK back to normal life in a couple of weeks?

Sadly, it’s not quite that simple.

Allowing app users to self-diagnose opens the door to false alarms by hypochondriacs (or schoolkids who aren’t happy their school reopened). Medical validation needs readily available Covid-19 tests, so that professionals can authorise uploading the codes. Society needs to facilitate people going into self-quarantine, getting tested themselves, and locking themselves away for weeks, without delays. And a majority of the population needs to be using the app, but not everyone has a smartphone equipped with low-energy Bluetooth.

Automated alerts can’t replace detailed contact tracing, as practised in South Korea and Singapore. But interview based contact-tracing is labour intensive. Contact-tracing tens of thousands of cases individually would be an immense task for a health service that can’t even pick up every 111 call.

However, a widely used app in conjunction with testing could be a workable compromise, reducing the transmission rate to a scale that the NHS can handle, while allowing people for whom the risk is acceptably low to return to work, and to a more normal life.

How low a risk is acceptable, and how normal life should be, are political questions. No app can answer those.

I see why victims of sexual assault are concerned. I sympathise with fears that their personal lives will be raked over by defence lawyers seeking to exonerate the accused. Our justice system allows character slurs to be aired in court to the extent that sometimes the victim feels as though they were the one on trial. Signing up to what has been described as a “digital strip search” makes victims feel like they are the criminals.

The police, for their part, say they are concerned about failed convictions, following a spate of collapsed trials when evidence uncovered from phones has not been properly shared with the defence. This move, presumably, is to emphasise the importance of early disclosure of evidence.

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Why are we playing games with our privacy?

By Peter Franklin

Now the police are responding to protests from victim support organisations by offering to meet stakeholders to discuss the new consent forms. In a letter designed to reassure them, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) explains:

“When a crime is investigated, police will regularly seize devices of those accused. This is done using police powers and suspects are not required to consent. Coercive police powers are clearly not appropriate for use against complainants and access to their devices should be on the basis of specific, free and informed consent.” 

This does not reassure me, or quiet my alarm bells.

It only serves to confirm my fears that it’s not only victims who should be concerned about police taking powers to download information from our mobile phones in bulk. The truth is that any of us could find ourselves in a situation where the intimate details of our life are uploaded to a police computer. Any of us could be accused of a crime, or simply witness one. All of us should be asking – what are my rights in such a situation?

Just over a year ago, Privacy International – a charity that advocates for strong privacy protections in law and technology – released a report called “Digital Stop and Search; how the police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone”. After months of dogged investigations using the Freedom of Information Act they concluded that “in the UK, police are using highly intrusive technology to extract and store data from individual’s phones, on a questionable legal basis”.

It transpires that the police have been acquiring highly personal information this way for the past ten years. Some forces have downloaded data from tens of thousands of mobile phones – and with no real legal basis for doing so.

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Don't be afraid of the digital dustbin

By Sam Leith

The systems used – often “highly intrusive technology”– varies between forces, and not all have used it. But those that did were able to download far more information than even the phone’s owner could access. Deleted and hidden data – location, health, passwords – could be extracted. The contents of WhatsApp messages, which you might assume are private because they are encrypted, have been extracted and used in court. Then there’s all the easily accessible stuff – calendar, contacts, text messages, photographs – right there in the palm of the police officer’s hand. They could find out far more about you from the phone than they ever could from searching your house.

Unlike a physical search of your house, though, these data extraction procedures were carried out without a warrant and without a clearly defined legal framework. Any legal justifications that were offered by those forces that responded to Privacy International’s enquiries were often vague. Their defence relied heavily on PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, which Privacy International (PI) describes as “a piece of legislation written long before a phone became a device that could be used as a pocket surveillance tool”.

Following the publication of their report, Privacy International made a number of recommendations: guidance should be issued to the public about their rights; a warrant should be obtained before forensically examining anybody’s smartphone; and there should be independent oversight. They also invoked the principles of necessity and proportionality – and called on the Home Office to launch an independent review.

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In Scotland, the report – combined with further investigations by The Sunday Herald – prompted parliamentary scrutiny. It’s the first time parliamentarians anywhere in the UK have called police to account in relation to key issues around data extraction technology. And as a result, Police Scotland, had to put their “cyber kiosk” roll out on hold.

The technology, which allows officers to circumvent passwords or other security measures to access data stored on mobile devices, was being used, according to the sub-committee on policing, by frontline officers “without any human rights, equality or community impact assessments, data protection or security assessments, and in the absence of any public information campaign”. No oversight. No recourse. No boundaries.

Following the publication of the PI report, the Information Commissioner’s Office is now conducting an investigation into “use of data extraction technology on the mobile phones of suspects, victims and witnesses”.

But rather than wait for the results of this enquiry, police went ahead with their consent form, asking victims to consent to a violation of their privacy and human rights or have their case dropped.

Perhaps they are hoping to address both the failures of the disclosure system and the absence of a formal basis for extracting mobile phone data with one form. If so, they’re misguided on both counts.

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How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

Lack of data has not the been the problem behind those recent collapsed cases when the disclosure system failed.

One such high-profile rape case was dismissed, for example, after messages between the alleged victim and her friends were found to include positive references to the accused, Liam Allan, and to their ongoing relationship. Mr Allan had been under investigation for nearly two years and the police had gone through the accuser’s mobile phone data – including 57,000 text messages.

The data was in police files, but the human being responsible for going through it failed to find the key material. Since nothing of note was found, they refused requests to hand over the material to the defence, deeming it “not relevant”. The court case collapsed after three days after the data was finally handed over to the defence lawyers and messages from the victim asking for “casual sex” were found.

There’s no use having the information if you don’t know what you’re looking for – the data might as well be a ton of cuneiform tablets. The police don’t necessarily have the capacity or wherewithal to deal with it, and that’s why the disclosure system is flawed – not because they didn’t get their hands on it earlier.

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Prepare to be microchipped

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, a consent form, signed under pressure, gives us no protection fromunre unregulated data extraction. And this applies to anyone – not only victims. We should all be be insisting on robust regulation and oversight of the “digital strip search”, because this potentially affects anybody who owns a mobile phone.

Naturally, we’re concerned about those companies who want to profile and target us, in order to sell us stuff. But news that being accused of a crime, witnessing a crime, or even being the victim of a crime – or even having been in touch with any of those people – could remove our fundamental right to privacy in the eyes of the law should worry us much more.

Police forces are currently under no obligation to tell people their rights, to inform them of what kind of information will be obtained, or to give them an inventory of what has been downloaded. There are also no limits on how long they can retain the data.

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If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

Data from your mobile telephone has power. It could convict a criminal or exonerate an innocent person, whether you are the accuser, the accused, or a witness. Just as the home of a suspect can yield useful evidence, so too can an electronic device.

So while it may be proportionate and necessary to search such devices to solve or prevent crime, before investigators are allowed to enter our digital spaces, we should expect the same protections we are afforded when they search our homes.

Those legal protections not only guard us against incidental misuse of our data, such as security breaches or miscarriages of justice. They also draw a line around our basic right to privacy from the state.

Only a totalitarian regime should require every citizen to be transparent in the eyes of the law, simply to ease police investigations. The presumption of privacy should be the one to which police have to seek exceptions. Like the presumption of innocence in a defendant, it is a universal right because none of us knows when we might be the one to need it.

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Who would you trust with your bio-data?

By Peter Franklin

I went on to argue that Britain’s NHS – a single organisation that gathers valuable medical information on a vast scale – was well-placed for this new era of data-driven medical research. What I should have added is that the NHS (or at least the Department of Health) is very much on the case. Only the other week came the announcement that Genomics England, a company owned by the DoH, is offering to sequence your DNA for a fee – reported to be in the region of £500.

If that seems a little on the steep side, the geneticist Robert Plomin (writing in the Spectator) provides some context. Firstly, unlike the partial service normally provided to the public by commercial gene sequencing companies, Genomics England is offering the full monty:

“…the NHS is offering to genotype nearly all (95 per cent+) of the six billion rungs in the spiral staircase of DNA, called whole-genome sequencing (WGS). That’s the DNA we inherit in the single cell with which we begin life, and it’s the same DNA in all the trillions of cells in our body.”

Secondly, it’s at a competitive price:

“When the human genome was first sequenced 15 years ago, it cost more than £1 billion. Technological advances have now brought the cost for WGS down to under £1,000… Some DTC [direct-to-consumer] companies are beginning to offer WGS with price tags beginning at about £1,500, although much of the cost depends on how analysis and interpretation is on offer. So if WGS on the NHS cost £500, this would be several times cheaper than the cheapest offer from a DTC company.”

Part of the deal is that you agree to share your (anonymised) DNA data with researchers, but you do also get a “personalised report.”

Not everyone is impressed. Writing for the Guardian, David King of Human Genetics Alert raises a number of doubts – for instance, over the usefulness of the data to the individual, the long-term robustness of anonymisation and the unfulfilled promise of human genomics:

“The story begins in 2000 with the announcement of the completion of the sequence of the human genome… As time has gone on, and the promised medical breakthroughs have largely failed to materialise, the dream that genome data will give good predictions of personal risk for common and complex medical conditions has faded. “

He also argues that “programmes of pre-conception genetic screening can be powerful drivers of eugenics”:

“People who know their genome sequence could ask their partner to also undergo genome sequencing to ensure that they are not ‘genetically incompatible’ before marriage or having children. With millions of people having their genome sequenced, this could quickly develop into a socially required – or even legally enforced – standard of behaviour.”

Such concerns are legitimate and should not be lightly dismissed. However, given that gene screening technology is already a mass consumer product and that whole-genome sequencing is becoming cheaper all the time, it would appear the gene genie is already out of the bottle.

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Letting the gene genie out of the bottle

By Peter Franklin

The best hope for keeping it under control lies with public healthcare providers like the NHS. Plomin argues that the internal incentives of the organisation are such that it is well-placed not only to gather our data, but also to make ethical use of it. Because the purpose of the NHS is to provide healthcare free at the point of need, there is no incentive to withdraw cover from ‘bad risks’. Furthermore, and unlike a private healthcare provider, it has every incentive to reduce demand for its services by prioritising prevention.

Just how much of use comes from analysing the ‘big data’ produced by widespread DNA sequencing remains to be seen. But one of the brightest hopes is that, for certain medical conditions, we’ll be better able to identify the most at-risk parts of the population – and thus to improve the targeting of preventative measures. As well as saving money by avoiding expensive treatment further down the line, such knowledge might allow the NHS to cut down on the over-prescription of drugs.

But as valuable as the ability to target prevention would be, and Plomin makes a compelling case, it would depend on being able to match individuals to high risk genetic profiles. So while research into genetic risk can be done with anonymised data, the application of the findings to preventative healthcare would require at least some parts of the system to know who’s got what combination of risk-laden genes. Presumably this would include the recipients of the preventative interventions.

Once in possession of this knowledge, would they be required to disclose their genetic risk levels to insurers, employers and other interested parties? We already have to disclose information about known medical conditions when, say, obtaining travel insurance – so why wouldn’t the same apply to medically-relevant genetic data? That, surely, would be a good reason for leaving your genes unread.

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Kiss your privacy goodbye – CCTV is just the beginning

By Peter Franklin

If the British government is serious about establishing the UK as a leader in this field (and ventures like Genomics England would suggest it is) then ministers should begin by publishing a Genetic Privacy Bill setting out exactly what our rights would be in a future where DNA sequencing is commonplace.

The purpose of the project is combine data from all sorts of different sources to create a trustworthiness score for every citizen – on which various state-sanctioned rewards and restrictions will depend.

It’s like a financial credit rating, but covering all sorts of other social (or anti-social) behaviours – hence the name.

Coverage of this development in the western media is heavy on adjectives such as ‘sinister’, ‘dystopian’ and, of course, ‘Orwellian’ – but, for reasons I explored in a previous UnPacked, the social credit concept appears to be popular with the Chinese public.

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The dark side of China's Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

In a Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Why Big Brother Doesn’t Bother Most Chinese’, Adam Minter provides an astonishing example of social credit technology in action:

“In one Chinese city, the local court system recently launched a smartphone-based map that displays the location and identity of anyone within 500 meters who’s landed on a government creditworthiness blacklist. Worried the person seated next to you at Starbucks might not have paid a court-approved fine? The Deadbeat Map, as it’s known, provides pinpoint confirmation, the ability to share that information via social media and — if so inclined — a reporting function to notify the authorities.”

The Deadbeat Map and other pilot projects are being tested by various agencies, cities and companies, the most successful of which will be incorporated into the as yet unlaunched national system:

“Today there are more than 40 social-credit systems operating across China. Some are private: Sesame Credit, a subsidiary of Alibaba, collects and aggregates data generated on Alibaba services, such as a customer’s payment history and record of time and money spent online, then devises a score used to extend credit and other benefits. Others are run by the government, such as a national list of individuals who have defaulted on court judgments. “

Minter argues that “it’s difficult to imagine that there’s any good use for the Deadbeat Map, beyond public shaming and cruel entertainment”. But when did those things ever hold back the growth of social media – whether in China or the West?

As mentioned, there are reasons why Chinese society is receptive to social credit systems:

“…a whopping 76 percent of survey participants said that ‘mutual mistrust between citizens’ is a problem in Chinese society. Social-credit systems are viewed as a means of bridging that trust gap.”

Then again, does anybody anywhere need a legitimate excuse to poke their noses into other people’s business? If the opportunity presents itself then most people will make use of it.

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Click here for details on a free trip across America!

By Peter Franklin

The digital age presents us with many such opportunities. For instance, Google Earth is a hugely impressive source of aerial and satellite photography, allowing you to explore the remotest corners of the planet from the comfort of your sofa. But it also allows you to peer into your neighbours’ back gardens. Google Earth may provide breathtaking views of the Himalayas and sophisticated 3D mapping of cities from New York to Venice, but I suspect that a lot of people use the site to, er, keep an eye on goings-on rather closer to home.

Now imagine if there were a website in your country that allowed users to peer into the financial affairs of friends, family and workmates. Would privacy-minded Westerners refuse to use it on principle? Or would they comb through every available detail? I think we all know the answer to that one.

To be clear, the purpose of the Chinese state in developing its Social Credit System is not to cater to the country’s nosey neighbours; it is primarily intended as a powerful instrument of social control.

Nevertheless, in sharing at least some of the information it gathers on its people with its people, the government is giving them a stake in their own surveillance. Not doing so was Big Brother’s big mistake in Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he hadn’t kept all the gossip to himself, he could have saved himself – and the Ministry of Love – a lot of bother.

Western countries may have stronger privacy laws, but expect ‘open source Orwellianism’ to be the means by which public and private sector organisations push social credit and other intrusive technologies deeper into our lives.

If we believe we have more to gain from us knowing about other people’s lives than we have to lose from them knowing about ours, then we will consent to it.

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Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

It was the deadliest mass shooting in the US for years, yet neither Farook nor Malik had criminal records, and neither were on any terrorist watch list. In the months that followed, the FBI began to grapple with what they saw to be a troubling new phenomenon: online self-radicalisation. Painstakingly building a portrait of Farook and Malik’s life, they tried to learn why both had decided to die for a terrorist group neither had actually met. And to do that, Farook’s Apple iPhone became central to the search. The FBI asked Apple to unlock it, and Apple refused. A court order compelled Apple to open the phone, but again they said they’d legally fight it.

There was nothing unusual about this conflict. The FBI’s overwhelming mandate was to learn as much as they could about Farook to protect public safety. Apple’s, especially in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, was to assure their users that their data was secure – even those who turned out to be terrorists. And both sides saw the argument as far bigger than this single case. Both knew that it would set a new precedent for how security should be balanced against privacy; and both knew that the world was watching, with almost exactly half of the public supporting each position.

The debate was old; what was new was the way it was resolved. Just months before the attack, Apple had released an operating system that meant that Apple itself could not decrypt the device. Technology, in other words, that deliberately made its maker unable to comply with the court order they now faced, or any of the others they anticipated would emerge in the years ahead. The court then ruled that Apple had to write new software to crack the phone, but as Apple prepared to fight that case too, the FBI promptly withdrew the claim. Before the legal process could be concluded or enforced, the FBI had paid professional hackers to find an undisclosed flaw in the software, and broken it open themselves.

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The dangerous power of the clickbait king

By Carl Miller

For both Apple and the FBI, the battle in the courts had been a sideshow. That delicate, constantly changing trade-off of between privacy and security wasn’t decided by the finer principles of law, courtly argument and judicial interpretation. The decider was the technology itself. Apple had built technology to make the court order impossible. And the FBI had bought technology to mean they didn’t need Apple to carry it out.

The dispute was about something bigger than this single case. It showed that how the tensions, trade-offs and conflicts that we’ve always had are being resolved in an entirely new way.

Technologists have long known that the key questions of the digital age wouldn’t be decided at the ballot box or in the courts. Changing the world, they realised, didn’t mean winning the argument. It meant building new technology to decide the outcome. Technology, they knew, could make things possible or impossible, easy or difficult. You didn’t need to convince people to change, you simply needed to change the options that people had in the first place.

For the disputes that matter most, public debate and legal argument have, just like in San Bernardino, become something of an undercard billing. The main fight is over building technology to simply render the whole moral debate meaningless. In the red corner, technology is being built to usher in one kind of reality, and in the blue corner, technology is being built to stop them. Look almost anywhere today, and you can see the same thing happening. Technologies ‘duel’ with each other to decide what your life – and the world – is like.

Bitcoin is the most famous of this kind of political-technology. From the very beginning its aim was clear: to transform the status quo of corporations and states into one of decentralised networks. If you could build technology that created things like currencies without central banks, they reasoned, you simply make those central banks unnecessary.

Changing the structure of technology was really about changing the structure of society. Decentralised technology would create a similarly decentralised society, one without the concentrations of data, control and yes, power, that centralised systems inevitably produce. Bitcoin was only one of a whole universe of different technologies all trying to achieve this.

Decentralised money, decentralised social media platforms, decentralised email, decentralised shopping, all were aimed at undermining the states, hierarchies and corporations dominant, as they saw it, within the status quo. They saw the digital revolution as an opportunity to break apart old concentrations of power, not to create new ones. The old world pitted against the new. Old concentrations of power versus new ways of dispersing it.

Your privacy is also being decided by duelling technology, too. Apple announces new features on its browser to prevent Facebook and other data companies tracking its users across the web, while ad tech companies quietly build ingenuous, innovative ways of ‘finger-printing’ you as you travel around the web. These technologies duel generally out of sight – and it is largely them, not the body of cumbersome, slow moving privacy law, that decides in practice what your privacy online is.

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By Jamie Bartlett

The most obvious arena for this technological combat is online security. Go to DEF CON, a huge gathering of hackers and computer security specialists, and you will witness the thousands of technological struggles happening every day, side-by-side, that determine your online safety. Hackers – largely with the same skills – work as offence and defence: inventing entirely new ways to take control of your digital life, and desperately trying to find ways to plug the gaps. What determines your safety online is the outcome of this struggle: what is technologically possible, not what is legal.

Worryingly, these struggles are usually entirely invisible to us. You don’t see how spammers, marketers and even states constantly build bots and fake accounts to avoid detection, and people within Facebook and Twitter build technology to try to catch them. Likewise you don’t see the struggle over who controls the information you consume – behind the scenes some technologists work to game and manipulate search engine results, while Google and others desperately try to stop them.

The grand moral questions of our age are not being decided by public debate, the law, norms, principles or the conventional tumble of politics. They are being decided by a new dynamic, something I’ll call ‘technological achievability’. A clunky phrase, granted, but I think an important one. Is it easier and cheaper for cyber-criminals to find vulnerabilities in your computer, or is it easier for cyber-security specialists to keep you safe? Is it easier for propagandists to build fake accounts, or for the tech giants to detect and remove them? Which outcome, in other words, is it easier, cheaper, or more convenient for technology to be built to achieve.

Of the many shifts in power I’ve spent years trying to understand, this is perhaps the most important. The technologists on the front-lines of these struggles now have enormous moral agency in their hands; those of us who are not blockchain engineers or cryptography specialists, are shut out. However imperfect, the messy web of public debate, norms, law and politics was at least something we could all be involved in. Now we are trapped in the crossfire of the technologies duelling around us. More like spectators than we ever were, as our lives are shaped and moulded in this new way. More disempowered, I think, than we have ever been in the decisions that really matter, that really decide what our lives will be like.

And so, in front of us, a new struggle lies ahead. In an age of blindingly fast technological progress, we need to make morals matter again. How to do that, I don’t know. But the first step is to realise how dreadfully absent they are from the world as it is today.

Carl Miller’s newly released The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab is out now.

Only joking, of course I don’t – who do you think I am? Mark Zuckerberg?

But within a decade, maybe two, I’ll know all those things about you. What’s more, you’ll know all those things about me. And just about anyone else.

How can I be so sure? Well, it’s a matter of looking at the technology we’ve already got and extrapolating a little. To this end, I’d recommend two seemingly unrelated articles from the Economist. The first article is about sensors:

“The word ‘smart’ is ubiquitous these days. If you believe the hype, smart farms will all employ sensors to report soil conditions, crop growth or the health of livestock. Smart cities will monitor the levels of pollution and noise on every street corner. And goods in smart warehouses will tell robots where to store them, and how. Getting this to work, however, requires figuring out how to get thousands of sensors to transmit data reliably across hundreds of metres.”

Headed-up by Shyam Gollakota, a team of researchers from University of Washington are working on a solution – an adaptation of LoRa technology, in which chips use lower-frequency radio waves to transmit data:

“Dr Gollakota reckons that such chips can be made for less than 20 cents apiece. The signals they generate can be detected at ranges of hundreds of metres. Yet with a power consumption of just 20 millionths of a watt, a standard watch battery should keep them going a decade or more. In fact, it might be possible to power them from ambient energy.”

This technology isn’t designed to transmit data at great speed, but that doesn’t matter. If the chips are cheap and likely to get cheaper, then they provide the basis for the ubiquitous deployment of sensors. The individual dribbles of data might be modest in volume, but together they could be combined into a constantly updated digital model of the world about us. Imagine something like a live version of Google Street View, but in immensely more detail – and without people’s faces being blurred out.

Which brings us to the second article, which is about facial recognition technology:

“Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile.”

Assuming one has access to the necessary data (as gathered by CCTV and other sensory systems), facial recognition can be used to track the location of an identified individual in real time. And if that isn’t creepy enough, there’s more:

“The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too… Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, the algorithm could attribute their sexuality correctly 81% of the time. Humans managed only 61% (see article). In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.”

Our faces can also be ‘read’ to reveal detailed, and hitherto private, information about medical conditions, emotional states and behavioural patterns. Even the ‘benign’ applications of such a system have sinister implications – for instance, predicting criminal activity before it happens or drawing an emotional map of a city to see what kind of surroundings make people happiest.

Then there’s the question of who gets to use this all-seeing eye. Access to existing CCTV networks is generally controlled by private businesses or public bodies (and ultimately by the security services), however the ultra-cheap (and therefore widely owned) internet-connected sensors of the future may operate on a different model – feeding information into a shared system in much the same way that we currently feed our photographs into Facebook and Instagram.

Whichever website does the best job of integrating data from the ubiquitous sensors of the near future will become the dominant digital platform of the 21st century.