Cross-posted from Help Me Investigate

The Stirrer was an independent news website in Birmingham that investigated a number of local issues in collaboration with local people. One investigation in particular – into the employment of CCTV cameras in largely muslim areas of the city without consultation – was picked up by The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who discovered its roots in anti-terrorism funds.

The coverage led to an investigation into claims of police misleading councillors, and the eventual halting of the scheme.

As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, founder Adrian Goldberg – who now presents ‘5 live Investigates‘ and a daily show on BBC Radio WM – talks about his experiences of running the site and how the story evolved from a user’s tip-off.

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A must-read for any data journalist, aspiring or otherwise, is Simon Rogers’ post on The Guardian Datablog where he compares public and private sector pay.

This is a classic apples-and-oranges situation where politicians and government bodies are comparing two things that, really, are very different. Is a private school teacher really comparable to someone teaching in an unpopular school? What is the private sector equivalent of a director of public health or a social worker?

But if these issues are being discussed, journalists must try to shed some light, and Simon Rogers does a great job in unpicking the comparisons. From pay and hours worked, to qualifications and age (big differences in both), and gender and pay inequality (more women in the public sector, more lower- and higher-paid workers in the private sector), Rogers crunches all the numbers:

“[T]he proportion of low skill jobs in the private sector has increased, and the proportion of high skill jobs in the public sector increased to around 31% of all jobs by 2011, compared 26% of all private sector jobs.

“But, at the same time, people who are most highly qualified actually get paid worse in the public sector.

“… Public sector workers tend to be older … Average mean hourly earnings peak in the early 40s in both sectors. They decline slightly approaching retirement although the decline happens earlier in the private sector than in the public sector, possibly because the higher earners in the private sector are more likely to leave the labour market earlier.

“It also shows that if you’re older in the public sector, you get paid better than in the private sector.

“… [T]he bottom 5% of workers in the public sector earn less than £6.91 per hour, whereas in the private sector, 5% of workers earn less than £5.93 per hour.”

When you find yourself in an apples-and-oranges situation you can’t avoid, this is the way to do it. Any other examples?

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People who live in areas branded as ‘problem communities’ by the media feel disengaged with the news – but hyperlocal citizen journalism offers an opportunity to re-engage citizens. These are the findings of a piece of research from the Netherlands called ‘When News Hurts‘, which measured mainstream coverage of ‘problem communities’ then followed a hyperlocal project which involved local people.

The findings won’t be a big surprise to those running hyperlocal blogs, which often focus on practical steps to improving their area and building civic participation rather than merely telling the stories of failure. But they do offer some lessons for traditional publishers, not just on what they could do better, but on what they’re doing badly in their current coverage – especially the regional publishers who would be expected to provide more ground-level reporting on local issues:

“Remarkably, in spite of being located close to these areas, the regional press hardly differed in their coverage from their national (quality) counterparts [...] National newspapers quoted residents in 23 per cent of their larger reports on Kanaleneiland and 35 per cent of their reports on Overvecht. The regional newspaper quoted residents in only 26 per cent of its larger reports on Kanaleneiland and in 24 per cent of its reports on Overvecht. Unexpectedly, 55 per cent of all news items about a nearby elite neighbourhood (Wittevrouwen) used a resident as source.”

The effect of this, says author Irene Costera Meijer, is “social isolation and stigmatization”:

“‘‘It affects you’’, Hafida (age 25, Dutch-Moroccan) said, later adding: I don’t mind it that much, but, well, in fact I do. Simply how they talk about your neighbourhood, where you live. It makes me think like, hey, what’s going on here?

“Most residents expressed their anger about how reporters systematically reiterated cliches about their immediate environment, if not exaggerating them. As Timon de Jager (57) from Overvecht told us: When something gets into the press, it is always because of a problem in some place; it is covered widely right away, and this makes it seem as if the neighbourhood represents nothing beyond that one big problem.

“… One 54-year-old woman, working and living in Overvecht, explained how her husband had to help out every day, because she was too afraid to open her own garage doors after dark. Not until he died, she discovered when walking her dog, that her feeling of being unsafe was based on misinformation, ‘‘on ignorance and the stories by the media and stories by other residents.’”

What residents needed, it seemed, was more constructive and specific reporting:

“When the story devoted attention to crime or an alleged lack of safety, to degradation or loneliness, most residents would like to see them combined with a solution-oriented frame, a positive and upbeat tone, the use of different perspectives (instead of the conventional ‘‘hearing both sides’’) and a recognizable, concrete setting.”

Hyperlocal journalism, then, emerges as a different way of reporting, which requires non-traditional approaches. There’s a useful exploration of how we normally talk about ‘citizen journalism’ as only providing the opportunity to speak:

“Much of the analysis of mediated communication is modelled on a politics of expression, that is, of speaking up and out, finding a voice, making oneself heard, and so on … In our view, attention to the politics of listening provides a means of moving beyond questions of speaking and voice to canvass issues of dialogue and meaningful interaction across difference and inequality.”

And the research looks at the practical importance of hyperlocal media in “familiarizing the unfamiliar”:

“[It] affects residents’ feelings about their physical neighbourhood in a positive way. In line with Poletti (2011), this ‘‘life narrative’’ storytelling contributes to the prevalence of intimacy and affect in the construction of civic engagement. The neighbourhood becomes more their ‘‘own’

“… Taking responsibility for a ‘‘readable’’ neighbourhood means that residents take pains to understand others and to make themselves understandable to others. Silverstone has called this ethos ‘‘media hospitality’’, which he considers the obligation to hear and to listen and to create a space for effective communication, ‘‘obligations which are imposed both on the media-weak as well as the media-powerful’

“… Studies of hyper-local storytelling projects, we suggest, should move beyond thinking about community as a primary good and end in itself. What residents asked from neighbourhood journalists is that their stories facilitated a comfort zone, not by copying professional mediating practices on a hyper-local level, but by directing the source of the pain: mainstream journalisms’ contribution to miscommunication and misinterpretation of one’s surroundings and one’s fellow residents, which in turn contributed to a sense of losing one’s grip on neighbourhood reality. By giving the floor to everyday stories about everyday life by ordinary people living or working in the neighbourhoods, You in the Neighbourhood enabled residents to interpret each other’s behaviour, habits or responses more correctly. Becoming better able to understand their fellow residents made them in turn more predictable while also increasing the neighbourhood’s and residents’ familiarity.”

In conclusion, the writers detail both the advantages and disadvantages of being embedded in the community you are reporting on. Firstly, in terms of quality:

“Creating trust as part of a strategy of ‘‘listening’’ by violating the ‘‘producer/audience boundary’’ seemed to work out well, in professional as well as in community terms. The residents who ended up in a broadcasted TV item were all positive about this approach and had the feeling that their reality was well conveyed. The most personal, original and valuable items were often produced by those neighbourhood journalists who took time to get acquainted with the residents they wanted to interview*reports of which the editor in chief of the regional newscaster claimed to be outright jealous: ‘‘We never managed to get into the trailer camp, let alone get an interesting interview out of a resident.’’ “

But this didn’t, she says, work for every type of story:

“Although residents confided their story much more easily to neighbourhood journalists, not every neighbourhood reality could be shared just as easily. Storytelling neighbourhood seems to be limited in its range of topics (residents as subjects, not objects), news frame (constructive and solution oriented) and tone of voice (optimistic and cheerful). Residents themselves did not always feel free to discuss the seamy side of their neighbourhood, at least not on television, fearing that others would recognize them and turn against them.

“Like other residents, some felt ill at ease to uncover stories of crime or violence, knowing they frequented the same supermarket and the same schoolyards as the ‘‘villains’’. In addition, they found it difficult to present the downside of the neighbourhoods’ reality, without losing people’s trust. It remained difficult to address issues about differences in a non-racist discourse.”

Ultimately, there is a role for both ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ reporting, but a lot to be learned by local journalists both in how their work has an effect at a local level (in some cases their presence actually provoked the violent response that they were there to report) and in the absence of local ‘problem community’ voices in regional media.

There are also some practical applications in planning a productive hyperlocal project – and anticipating the holes in coverage that it is less likely to fill.

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The Guardian has been talking about being ‘of the web’ rather than ‘on the web’ for some years now, with a “federated” (as some staff call it) approach to publishing which often involves either selling advertising across, or pulling in content from, other sites (disclosure: this is one of them). Its Open Platform is a technical expression of the same idea, allowing others to build things with its content – which can then take advertising with it. And its successful Facebook app shows its ability to adopt any platform that works.

Now it has announced a partnership with arts organisations – and YouTube – that demonstrates a further development of this approach. 

It’s a recognition that it’s not just media organisations that are now in the content business (witness Manchester City’s policy of recruiting digital heads from press and TV) – and a news publisher’s role has to be re-assessed in that context (better to be partners than competitors, perhaps?).

Here is a list of what’s going to be produced as a result:

• Glyndebourne: live-streaming five operas, as well as “recordings to accompany two other productions this season [...] Each opera will be available to view again on the Guardian’s website, and each will be accompanied by a series of podcasts and videos as well as related editorial, blogs, picture galleries and live chat with the Guardian’s expert team of critics.
• Royal Opera House with YouTube: streaming “a full day of rehearsals from The Royal Ballet from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, featuring live streams of two ballets currently in development”
• The Young Vic: “working with them to develop an exclusive short film starring Patrick Stewart”
• The Roundhouse:  live streaming Cirkus Cirkör Undermän
• Artangel: streaming “intimate live performances and recorded podcasts by a number of renowned artists”

Naturally, acting as a platform for third party content raises the question of how this affects editorial integrity. In the announcement Stephen Folwell, Business Director, Multimedia and Brand Extensions, Guardian News & Media, mentions “the diverse [multimedia*] packages we can offer other potential partners.” But it wouldn’t be the first time a news organisation has had to manage this tension, as I coincidentally blogged about in my previous post - it’s just the old problem in a new suit.

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, art critic Jonathan Jones writes about how his role changed as readers became content producers too.

*Clarification from a GNM spokesperson, who adds: “We also offer sponsorship opportunities around multimedia content”

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Guest post by Duarte Romero

Since the start of the year the Argentinian newspaper ‘La Nación’ has been publishing ‘Nación Data’, a blog dedicated to data visualization, interactive projects and especially, all the news related with data journalism.

During this time they have been posting interviews with experts from the community, reporting popular events such as NICAR and sharing the most innovative pieces made by other newspapers.

The multimedia development manager of ‘La Nación’, Momi Peralta, pointed out that their main goal so far is to release as much data as they can.

It is important to highlight that in Argentina there is not a Freedom of Information Act, so most of the statistics and spreadsheets they use are made by their own journalists.

Peralta believes that this data journalism will help to open up information in her country:

“One of our aims [is to] produce good information in Argentina, opening new data and creating visualizations. Each [set of] data that is published means that more knowledge is released.”

Last Friday they launched a new platform, titled, simply: ‘Data’. This tool is used to publish those indices that are collected and refined by journalists and allow the possibility to download them as a spreadsheet or share on social networks.

On the dashboard you can find data about topics as different as traffic collisions, carbon dioxide emissions and the activity of the parliament.

Some are used in current stories but others are just uploaded for the interest of the public.

Peralta hopes that this project will help empower the open data movement in Argentina, so she wants to use the blog to keep in touch with the community.

She likes to compare data driven journalism with constructing a building. Data are the materials and tools are the technology, but if you want to make something you will need to order them first.

Finally, she points out that you may build things on your own but if you have contributions from other people, the result will be better.

Learning by doing

None of this would be possible if ‘La Nación’ had not made a great effort to train its workers in the main tools used in data journalism. The team that is in charge of this area attended several courses on Excel, Tableau, scraping and other techniques.

During the NICAR conference they played a video (embedded below) about this learning process to share their improvements and achievements with the community.

This enthusiasm was recognized by some of the most prestigious institutions of the online journalism community. In the last two years, ‘La Nación’ has received two ONA awards and one EPPY thanks to their innovative projects.

Furthermore, last week the Argentinian paper was chosen by the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews for a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news.

This award is shared with The New York Times, ProPublica and Spiegel Online and it means that ‘La Nación’ is the first paper written in Spanish to receive this prize.

Not many Spanish-language countries have developed a truly open data policy, but with more examples of media organisations working with data, the hope is that public institutions will be forced to improve their transparency and openness.

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Before the internet made it easier for advertisers to become publishers, they were already growing tired of the limitations (and inflated price) of traditional display advertising. In the magazine industry one of the big growth areas of the past 20 years was client publishing: helping – to varying degrees – companies create magazines which were then given or sold to customers, staff, members, or anyone interested in their field.

With some traditional advertising revenue streams dropping like a stone, newspapers belatedly started to see similar potential in their own markets. Trinity Mirror’s Media Wales are among a few newspaper publishers to sell video production services and the organisation has followed US newspapers in selling SEO services; while the FT followed Conde Nast when it recently bought an app production company.

While the execution varies, the idea behind it is consistent: this is no longer about selling content, or audiences, but expertise – and quite often expertise in distribution as much as in content production.

But the picture continues to change. And a new initiative from Facebook is worth watching closely in this regard:

“Facebook is encouraging advertisers to create ads based solely on the content they publish to their own Facebook pages

“… what Facebook really wants is for advertisers to spend time creating stuff that looks and acts just like the stuff Facebook users already like. (Worth noting that this is quite similar to Twitter’s ad strategy, which treats ads like tweets, and vice versa. Also worth noting: Just like Twitter’s ad strategy, this one should work very well on the limited real estate available on mobile phones.) It’s supposed to promote “earned” media — the industry’s name for promotion that fans/users/consumers end up doing for free, on their own.”

This is a natural extension of owning the platform. But whereas traditional publishers might try to sell users’ content (and, significantly, always feared Facebook staking a claim over their own), Facebook recognises that selling its distribution is the business they’re really in.

This starts to put Facebook in more direct competition with traditional media organisations, and has some significant potential implications:

• Firstly, it weakens publishers’ offerings on social media optimisation – they may have to advise clients to pay Facebook (and Twitter) as well as themselves.
• Secondly, it makes news organisations more direct competitors. In the same way that Apple initially blocked publishers from directing users to subscriptions outside apps, Facebook may see itself squaring up to media organisations.
• Finally, there’s always the chance that this will drive some advertisers out of the walled garden of Facebook and into the arms of the open web where they have more control. Maybe.

Whichever it is – and the whole project may fail to take off – publishers need to watch what Facebook is doing in this space, and adapt accordingly.

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There’s something almost seminal about this video promoting The Guardian’s ‘open journalism’. I’m not sure whether it’s the unusually honest acknowledgement that news is more complicated than it is often presented; the way that the video itself plays with our preconceptions, drawing attention to them in the process; or the portrayal of a production process in which non-journalists are a vital part.

I lie, of course: it’s all of those things. It’s an image of journalism utterly different from how it presented itself in the 20th century, different – if we’re honest – from the image in most journalists’, and most journalism students’, minds.

I expect I’ll be showing this a lot. Watch it.

PS: If you have another 3 minutes, here’s Alan Rusbridger giving a slightly less dramatised angle on the same topic:

…And then move on to these videos linked from this page on how to get involved: from head of news Ian Katz:

…and on sports journalism:

…and culture reporting:

…and comment:

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Here’s a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism that goes beyond the weekend’s player ratings. As one of the biggest names in European football goes into administration, The Guardian carries a piece by the author of Rangerstaxcase.com, a blogger who “pulled down the facade at Rangers”, including a scathing commentary on the Scottish press’s complicity in the club’s downfall:

“The Triangle of Trade to which I have referred is essentially an arrangement where Rangers FC and their owner provide each journalist who is “inside the tent” with a sufficient supply of transfer “exclusives” and player trivia to ensure that the hack does not have to work hard. Any Scottish journalist wishing to have a long career learns quickly not to bite the hands that feed. The rule that “demographics dictate editorial” applied regardless of original footballing sympathies.

“[...] Super-casino developments worth £700m complete with hover-pitches were still being touted to Rangers fans even after the first news of the tax case broke. Along with “Ronaldo To Sign For Rangers” nonsense, it is little wonder that the majority of the club’s fans were in a state of stupefaction in recent years. They were misled by those who ran their club. They were deceived by a media pack that had to know that the stories it peddled were false.”

Over at Rangerstaxcase.com, the site expands on this in its criticism of STV for uncritical reporting:

“There does not appear to be a point where the media learns its lessons. There is no capacity for improvement. No voice that says: we have been misled by people from this organisation so often in the past that we need to get corroboration before we publish anything more. Alastair Johnston, you will recall, artfully created the impression for Rangers’ supporters and shareholders  that the payment of the tax bills that are now crushing their club would be the responsibility of the parent company. His words then were carefully chosen to avoid actually lying, but his intended audience seemed in little doubt at the time as to what they thought he meant.  Either Mr. Johnston has been misrepresented by STV or he appears to be trying to gain an advantage in the battle to oust Whyte by misleading Rangers’ supporters.”

The piece also includes some interesting reflections on collaborative journalism and crowdsourcing:

“Rangerstaxcase.com has become a platform for some of the sharpest minds and most accomplished professionals to share information, debate, and form opinions based upon a rational interpretation of the facts rather than PR-firm fabrications. In all of the years when the mainstream media had a monopoly on opinion forming and agenda setting, the more sentient football fan had no outlet for his or her opinions. Blogs and other modern media, like Twitter, have democratised information distribution.

“Rangerstaxcase.com has gone far beyond its half-baked “I know a secret” origins to become a forum for citizen journalism. The power of the crowd‑sourced investigation initiated by anyone who is able to ignite the interest of others is a force that has the potential to move mountains in our society. All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard.”

Rangerstaxcase.com is not unique. Combine the passion of sports supporters with the lack of critical faculty in much sports journalism and you have potentially fertile ground.

For my own club, Bolton Wanderers, for example, I turn to Manny Road (site currently laid low by a malware attack).

For the Olympics there will be a regular and easy supply of good news stories to wade through, but also an extremely active network of local and international blogs from people scrutinising the foggier side of the Olympic spirit, which is why I set up Help Me Investigate the Olympics and am encouraging my students to connect with those communities.

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As part of an ongoing series of profiles of young journalists, I interviewed Rosie Taylor about her work as founding editor of student media showcase site Ones To Watch which she balances with a role as trainee reporter at the Daily Mail.

What led you to your current roles?

I got the bug for journalism writing for my student newspaper at the University of Sheffield and was news editor in my final year. My involvement in student media gave me the idea for Ones to Watch.

I did work experience everywhere I could find a sofa to sleep on for a week, got a minimum wage job covering reporters on leave at my local paper and managed to get a Scott Trust Bursary to do a postgraduate course in Print Journalism at Sheffield.

This ultimately led to a job at the Mail, where I spent five months on secondment at the Manchester Evening News before moving to the Mail offices in London this year.

What do your jobs involve?

I run Ones to Watch in my spare time, which mainly involves looking through hundreds of articles produced by students around the UK every day and putting a selection of the best ones on the site. I’m also constantly on the look out for new start-ups, student media news and ways to expand the site.

In my day job I’m a general news reporter, covering anything that gets thrown at me!

How do you see things developing in the future?

I’m still clinging to the hope that journalism, in one form or another, will survive throughout my lifetime. I want to keep writing stories and breaking news and I’m fascinated by how the platform for doing so is changing all the time.

I hope that Ones To Watch will continue to expand and that my mission to raise the profile of student media as a vital part of our press will continue to gain momentum.

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The following post was originally published by Gary Herman on the NUJ New Media blog. It’s reproduced here with permission.

Here at Newmedia Towers we are being swamped by events which at long last are demonstrating that the internet is really rather relevant to the whole debate about media ethics and privacy. So this is by way of a short and somewhat belated survey of the news tsunami – Google, Leveson, Twitter, ACTA, the EU and more.

When Camilla Wright, founder of celebrity gossip site Popbitch (which some years ago broke the news of Victoria Beckham’s pregnancy possibly before she even knew about it), testified before Leveson last week (26 January 2012) [Guardian liveblog; Wright's official written statement (PDF)] the world found out (if it could be bothered) how Popbitch is used by newspaper hacks to plant stories so that they can then be said to have appeared on the internet. Anyone remember the Drudge report, over a decade ago?

Wright, of course, made a somewhat lame excuse that Popbitch is a counterweight to gossip magazines which are full of stories placed by the PR industry.

But most interesting is the fact that Wright claimed that Popbitch is self-regulated and that it works.

Leveson pronounced that he is not sure there is ‘so much of a difference’ between what Popbitch does and what newspapers do – which is somehow off the point. Popbitch – like other websites – has a global reach by definition and Wright told the Inquiry that Popbitch tries to comply with local laws wherever it was available – claims also made more publicly by Google and Yahoo! when they have in the past given in to Chinese pressure to release data that actually or potentially incriminated users and, more recently, by Twitter when it announced its intention to regulate tweets on a country-by-country basis.

Trivia – like the stuff Popbitch trades – aside, the problem is real. A global medium will cross many jurisdictions and be accessible within many different cultures. What one country welcomes, another may ban. And who should judge the merits of each?

Confusing the internet with its applications

The Arab Spring showed us that social media – like mobile phones, CB radios, fly-posted silkscreen prints, cheap offset litho leaflets and political ballads before them – have the power to mobilise and focus dissent. Twitter’s announcement should have been expected – after all, tweeting was never intended to be part of the revolutionaries’ tool-kit.

There are already alternatives to Twitter – Vibe, Futubra, Plurk, Easy Chirp and Blackberry Messenger, of course – and the technology itself will not be restrained by the need to expand into new markets. People confuse the internet with its applications – a mistake often made by those authorities who seek to impose a duty to police content on those who convey it.

Missing the point again, Leveson asked whether it would be useful to have an external ombudsman to advise Popbitch on stories and observed that a common set of standards across newspapers and websites might also help.

While not dismissing the idea, Wright made the point that the internet made it easy for publications to bypass UK regulators.

This takes us right into the territory of Google, Facebook and the various attempts by US and international authorities to introduce regulation and impose duties on websites themselves to police them.

ACTA, SOPA and PIPA

The latest example is the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) – a shadowy international treaty which, according to Google’s legal director, Daphne Keller, speaking over a year ago, has ‘metastasized’ from a proposal on border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework covering copyright and the internet.

According to a draft of ACTA, released for public scrutiny after pressure from the European Union, internet providers who disable access to pirated material and adopt a policy to counter unauthorized ‘transmission of materials protected by copyright’ will be protected against legal action.

Fair use rights would not be guaranteed under the terms of the agreement.

Many civil liberty groups have protested the process by which ACTA has been drafted as anti-democratic and ACTA’s provisions as draconian.

Google’s Keller described ACTA as looking ‘a lot like cultural imperialism’.

Google later became active in the successful fight against the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the related Protect Intellectual Proerty Act (PIPA), which contained similar provisions to ACTA.

Google has been remarkably quite on the Megaupload case, however. This saw the US take extraterritorial action against a Hong Kong-based company operating a number of websites accused of copyright infringement.

The arrest of all Megaupload’s executives and the closure of its sites may have the effect of erasing perfectly legitimate and legal data held on the company’s servers – something which would on the face of it be an infringement of the rights of Megaupload users who own the data.

Privacy

Meanwhile, Google – in its growing battle with Facebook – has announced its intention to introduce a single privacy regime for 60 or so of its websites and services which will allow the company to aggregate all the data on individual users the better to serve ads.

Facebook already does something similar, although the scope of its services is much, much narrower than Google’s.

Privacy is at the heart of the current action against Google by Max Mosley, who wants the company to take down all links to external websites from its search results if those sites cover the events at the heart of his successful libel suit against News International.

Mosley is suing Google in the UK, France and Germany, and Daphne Keller popped up at the Leveson Inquiry, together with David-John Collins, head of corporate communications and public affairs for Google UK, to answer questions about the company’s policies on regulation and privacy.

Once again, the argument regarding different jurisdictions and the difficulty of implementing a global policy was raised by Keller and Collins.

Asked about an on-the-record comment by former Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, that ‘only miscreants worry about net privacy’, Collins responded that the comment was not representative of Google’s policy on privacy, which it takes ‘extremely seriously’.

There is, of course, an interesting disjuncture between Google’s theoretical view of privacy and its treatment of its users. When it comes to examples like Max Mosley, Google pointed out – quite properly – that it can’t police the internet, that it does operate across jurisdictions and that it does ensure that there are comprehensive if somewhat esoteric mechanisms for removing private data and links from the Google listings and caches.

Yet it argues that, if individuals choose to use Google, whatever data they volunteer to the company is fair game for Google – even where that data involves third persons who may not have assented to their details being known or when, as happened during the process of building Google’s StreetView application, the company collected private data from domestic wi-fi routers without the consent or knowledge of the householders.

Keller and Collins brought their double-act to the UK parliament a few days later when they appeared before the joint committee on privacy and injunctions, chaired by John Whittingdale MP.

When asked why Google did not simply ‘find and destroy’ all instances of the images and video that Max Mosley objected to, they repeated their common mantras – Google is not the internet, and neither can nor should control the websites its search results list.

Accused by committee member Lord MacWhinney of ‘ducking and diving’ and of former culture minister, Ben Bradshaw of being ‘totally unconvincing’, Keller noted that Google could in theory police the sites it indexed, but that ‘doing so is a bad idea’.

No apparatus disinterested and qualified enough

That seems indisputable – regulating the internet should not be the job of providers like Google, Facebook or Twitter. On the contrary, the providers are the ones to be regulated, and this should be the job of legislatures equipped (unlike the Whittingdale committee) with the appropriate level of understanding and coordinated at a global level.

The internet requires global oversight – but we have no apparatus that is disinterested and qualified enough to do the job.

A new front has been opened in this battle by the latest draft rules on data protection issued by Viviane Reding’s Justice Directorate at the European Commission on 25 January.

Reding is no friend of Google or the big social networks and is keen to draw them into a framework of legislation that will – should the rules pass into national legislation – be coordinated at EU level.

Reding’s big ideas include a ‘right to be forgotten’ which will apply to online data only and an extension of the scope of personal data to cover a user’s IP address. Confidentiality should be built-in to online systems according to the new rules – an idea called ‘privacy by design’.

These ideas are already drawing flak from corporates like Google who point out that the ‘right to be forgotten’ is something that the company already upholds as far as the data it holds is concerned.

Reding’s draft rules includes an obligation by so-called ‘data controllers’ such as Google to notify third parties when someone wishes their data to be removed, so that links and copies can also be removed.

Not surprisingly, Google objects to this requirement which, if not exactly a demand to police the internet, is at least a demand to ‘help the police with their enquiries’.

The problem will not go away: how do you make sure that a global medium protects privacy, removes defamation and respects copyright while preserving its potential to empower the oppressed and support freedom of speech everywhere?

Answers on a postcard, please.

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