Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Social Justice – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 25 January 2023.
Thank you, Minister. The Data Justice Lab, based at Cardiff University, defines data justice as the
'relationship between datafication and social justice, highlighting the politics and impacts of data-driven processes and big data'— essentially, highlighting the potential harms and risks to citizens. We have seen this in our Equality and Social Justice Committee inquiry into domestic violence and the needs of migrant women. Elizabeth, of the Step Up Migrant Women coalition, told us that, when they encouraged a woman to report domestic abuse to the police, they reported it online, and, eight days later, an immigration enforcement letter arrived at their house. And in 2019, it was reported that a police force in England admitted to a written agreement with the Department for Work and Pensions to share any information on disabled people taking part in climate protests. We also know that, in Hackney, the local authority used a predictive analysis database to assess all 53,000 children living there. They used this database to identify which children may be at risk from neglect, and they used their characteristics, such as age, ethnicity and deprivation, to create this score, which I would, essentially, call 'citizen scoring'. And the thing about citizen scoring, and this kind of data that's collected in public sectors, is that people are completely unaware that this behavioural data is being collected on them; they are being assessed, they are being categorised and they have no way to fight back on this and get any transparency around it. Researchers have argued that data practices have become normalised in our society, before a chance for a broader public discussion on the ethics and morals of the use of our data in this way. So, Minister, do you agree with me that, as citizen scoring continues to develop in the public sector, our human rights must be reflected both in the digital world as they should be offline?