The information commissioner is taking enforcement actions against Leave.EU and Arron Banks’s Eldon Insurance. A total of £135,000 in fines will be levied against the two organisations for their practice of sharing mailing lists without consent, with the possibility of more if other breaches are found.
Facebook faced harsh words, but little action, with the ICO referring the company to the Irish data protection authority for action over its surveillance practices. “There’s a fundamental tension between the advertising business model of Facebook and fundamental rights like the protection of privacy,” the Information Commissioner said.
Cambridge Analytica may not exist any more, but the rump of the company is facing its own prosecution over failure to cooperate with a request for personal data from a US citizen.
The Electoral Commission was unable to answer many questions, owing to various ongoing investigations, including the National Crime Agency inquiring into the source of Arron Banks’s donations to Leave.EU. Representatives from the commission expressed frustration over a separate gag preventing disclosure of a £435,000 donation to the DUP from a Scottish body.
The Electoral Commission also bemoaned the slow pace of legislation to grant the body more powers, noting that it had first suggested a requirement for imprints on online political communications in 2003, and had been asking for the ability to levy higher fines – the current maximum is £20,000 – since at least 2015.
The Advertising Standards Authority called for the digital advertising industry to begin paying its fair share of the regulator’s costs. The ASA is funded by a 0.1% levy on ad spend, but very few digital advertisers pay the tariff.
Jo Stevens asks for a substantial levy on tech companies to fund regulatory bodies. Parker replies: “The funding of the ASA has always relied on a levy, a 0.1% levy, paid for by companies buying advertising.
“The movement of advertising online poses a structural challenge for that. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to crack that problem, but we’re not there yet. We need everyone to contribute meaningfully and fairly to the ASA system.
“That is something, I think, we need to keep working on. My preference would be for it to be done within the ASA system we’ve got at the moment with more funding from the parts of the digital advertising system that is not currently contributing fairly.”
Collins is now fighting for the rights of people who buy fake Hamilton tickets on Viagogo through Google adverts. He spends rather a long time on it before noticing the clock and handing over to Simon Hart, who asks whether he could be held liable for false posts on Facebook.
Parker again highlights that the ASA doesn’t regulate political speech.
Collins brings up Martin Lewis’s campaign against fake adverts on Facebook using his image. Parker: “The ads that reappear are different ads. But this is a perfect example of what I was talking about, we need to build new procedures with large online platforms like Facebook.”
Collins asks whether this failure to pre-clear is endemic to Facebook. “I don’t see it quite like that. Google and Facebook sign up to the ASA system. In their ad policies, they say that advertisers have to comply. There’s a genuine question over whether they just pass that on to their advertisers, and people who spot and report them.
“We’re talking to them at the moment about how we can build those systems and processes.”
Sites such as Facebook that are running adverts and making money from them should ensure they take down ads that make false claims, says Parker. “We need to make sure that our rulings are applied automatically across these large online platforms, and even to stop them going up in the first place.
“How can we work more closely with the online platforms to make sure that happens?”
Pow highlights that the ASA’s code doesn’t apply to political advertising.
Parker: “We don’t cover it, no, and the reasons for that are that our system for regulation relies on the people that we are regulating buying into our regulation. The political parties and big campaign groups have never agreed to comply with our codes.
“There are things that one needs to think about around free speech,” Parker says. “If a regulator was regulating the political parties and campaigning groups ... to make sure they agreed with a code of practice, it would need to make sure that it was drawing the line between strong expressions of political opinion and straightforward misrepresentations of fact. Those are rare, and it’s often the case that one person’s straightforward expression of fact is another person’s political opinion.”
But, he adds, “if someone were interested in signing up to such a code, we think we could help them. But we cannot take this on ourselves when these very important preconditions are a very long way from being met.”
Rebecca Pow opens the questioning of the ASA’s Guy Parker, asking whether it’s time for real regulation to take over from the advertising industry’s self-regulation.
“We regulate advertising in all media, including online,” Parker says, “and not just paid-for advertising.”
“The standards we apply are almost, without exception, the same for broadcast and non-broadcast advertising. Around 75% of the work we do is around encouraging adverts to not be misleading. The rules we have in our code are basically the same as the rules in statute that require that ads aren’t misleading.
Somehow Damian Collins has managed to issue a response to the first session with the ICO while still chairing two further sessions. The magic of having staff.
He says:
I welcome today’s report from the Information Commissioner’s Office as a sign of the determination of the regulatory authorities to root out breaches of the law that threaten to undermine our democratic political system. It puts on notice any organisation that considers using people’s data indiscriminately in a battle to win votes. They will be subject to intense scrutiny.
On Facebook, I welcome the information commissioner’s comments that the platform needs to change and take much greater responsibility, and her call for Facebook to be subject to stricter regulation and oversight. It is noted that she thinks it would be ‘very useful’ for Mark Zuckerberg to appear in person to answer questions from my committee.
Looking to the future, we hear loudly the opinion of the information commissioner that the time for self-regulation is over and a time of accountability is here where parliament sets the objectives and outcomes for social media companies to follow, rather than the regulator taking on individual complaints.
