TfGL2021 - S3 - Ep 3 - Protect the Data

Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.

Jonny Rae-Evans is on hosting duties, and he is joined by TFGL team members Greg Ashton and Faye Schofield

Our special guest is Chris Burns, Product Person who’s recently worked with The Department for Education and The English Institute of Sport. Chris is a regular mentor at Manchester Met Uni and Tech For Good Live’s Help A Charity initiative. He also co-organises the Deliver Sessions meetup.

Transcript

Jonny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the tech for good live podcast. It's a podcast all about using technology to have a positive social impact. You can tell we've been really effective as a podcast because now nothing bad ever happens with technology. Out there on the interwebs, everything is just fine. Mission accomplished. Well done Greg. On today's episode, we're talking about why women aren't entering the tech industry. If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say it's because the industry is misogynistic to its core. Unfair pay and unfair policies are everywhere. Sexual harassment seems to be a requirement in every department at every tech company with pretty much zero accountability. Oh, also, there's massive societal pressure and segmentation that begins right at a young age and it prevents skills from getting into things like computer science. Stay tuned to find out if that's true. I'm sure it's all okay, though, right, Greg? 

Greg: Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. 

Jonny: [laughs] Okay. We'll also be talking about a positive story that involves football and crowdfunding. That's unexpected but we'll see how it plays out. And Greg will be walking us through the NHS data breach, again. I'm sure it's all absolutely fine. Nothing to worry about. It's not like the NHS hold any sensitive data anyway. But hopefully, we'll have a fun story as an and finally, at the end, maybe a video of a crab playing Tetris on a Nintendo game perfectly using his little claws to spin those shapes around. Do we have anything like that Greg, for the end? 

Greg: Yeah, definitely. 

Jonny: Great. Okay, let's get podcasting. Joining me in this particular circle of how, we have Greg Ashton, the man with a plan for each podcast. Greg, hello. And if you had to be any type of animal, fictional or otherwise, but you'd still go about doing your daily life and have to have your job and stuff, what animal would it be?

Greg: I'd want to be Aslan cause he's, he's chill as fuck and just kind of has his shit together. But actually, I think I'm probably more like Godzilla, where I've been driven mad into some kind of giant fiery monster that will wander the streets burning people before me. I think that's probably more realistic.

Jonny: Also, Aslan is Jesus isn't he and I'm not, whilst you do have to beard I don't know if you can carry off that kind of weighty illogical aspect of it.

Greg: I'm just not chill enough anymore. 

Jonny: Not chill enough, no. Fake news Fay Schofield is back on the podcast.

Fay: Oh God. 

Jonny: Fay hello, same question for you. 

Fay: Hi. I mean, well, if I've still got to, like, do my job, which is really boring, then I need thumbs, I'd probably have to be some form of monkey. But I hate monkeys. They're really bad on the animal, 

Jonny: The animal. 

Fay: [laughs] The animal. I don't know what sort of monkey I'd be. I don't know, maybe a little golden one. But not because then I couldn't type properly or anything. I’d just have to be a chimpand that's really boring. And also really, really scary. I do not like monkeys at all. 

Jonny: I think you’d like them more if you were one though. 

Fay: Possibly. Yeah. Yeah, I’d be a chimp. 

Jonny: Okay. That's not bad. I don't think that's bad. And me, I'm Jonny Rae-Evans. I'm your host tonight. I think I'd be a cat because I love cats. Our cats who live with us have a perfect life. I hate them because I'm so overcome with jealousy. But I'm also confident a cat could do my job quite easily, to be honest. 

Fay: [laughs]

Jonny: So yeah, I’d be a cat. So we have a guest with us today. Chris Burns. Chris is a product person who's recently worked with the Department of Education and the English Institute of Sport. Chris has a regular mentor at Manchester University and Tech for good live help a charity initiative. He also co-organises the Deliver sessions meetup. Hey, Chris, how are you doing? 

Chris: Hi everyone. Yeah, great thanks. 

Jonny: Great to have you with us. And I guess the same question for you. What animal are you going to choose in this ridiculous introduction?

Chris: I was thinking along the lines of a bird. It would have to be a nice bird or Sparrow or something like that. Quite innocuous and would be able to get on with the day to day stuff without any due attention or yeah, prodding or poking. Because I imagine most animals would get frowned upon doing the work that I do.

Jonny: Yeah, I can see, I can see a bird being a good choice. I’d probably want to be like a bigger bird. You know, one that's not going to get hassled by other birds. 

Chris: Yeah maybe. 

Jonny: Like an eagle. 

Greg: Like a nice bird. I was thinking oh, like a falcon not a sparrow. [laughs]

Jonny: Everyone likes a sparrow though. They’re universally liked I think. 

Fay: They do but they don't last very long. They've got like a lifespan of like 18 months or something. I might be getting confused with robins but robins just do not last long at all.

Jonny: It's making me want to pick a sparrow now, to be honest [laughs] Okay, so Chris, it’s fabulous to have you on the podcast with us and we're gonna get cracking straightaway into the first topic which I believe by the stat of the week.

Greg: I don't think I've got much more to say on this. I think you covered it in your little rant in the uh….

Jonny: I’m so sorry [laughs] 

Greg: [laughs] 

Jonny: So it’s not all okay? It's not fixed now?

Greg: No, of course it's not fixed. It feels like we talk about this every year now. You know, we've been doing this a while and it just doesn't seem to have got any better. So, in 2020, the number of girls choosing to study computer science GCSE was just under 17,000. Just over 21.4% of the total entrance, compared with 61.5 1000 boys, the percentage of women in tech has barely moved. So it was 15.7% in 2009, to 17% now. Things just don't seem to be moving. There was a comment from a technology teacher at Hathershaw College in Oldham. And she said, in most schools, only about 10% of students taking product design would be girls, whereas food technology has always been around a 50/50 split. Textiles is 90% girls. And it just blows my mind that we're still going down those old fashioned kind of sex divisions of the kind of trades and learning that we're, we're seeing. Yeah, what does everyone think?

Fay: It's just not surprising. anymore. Do you know what I mean? It's like you say, we chat about this, you know, we chat about this every year. And it's like, you know, I think, like, I went to like an all girls school and I just got, you know, I kind of think about, like, what I did, we all had to do IT. And then we got the choice to do like, dt food, like textiles, and it's yeah, it's, you know, just kind of the amount of girls that do end up kind of doing like textiles and food and stuff like that. And I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's slightly different, if it's kind of like a, you know, a mixed gender school or whatever else. Because obviously, the school I went to, it was all girls. So it was kind of like it was kind of like a bit of an even split. It wasn't as kind of drastic as this. But I think for me, you know, I think this is kind of surprising, because you kind of think, okay, sometimes the barriers to like women working in tech, you know, I mean, obviously to do with education, access to education and stuff like that. But I was just wondering whether the pandemic would have lifted that ever so slightly. You know, like everyone working from home, possibly putting everyone on a bit more of an even keel but it seems as though it hasn't. So it's yeah, it's just, it's not surprising. It's always disappointing. You know, there's always like a million and one solutions, but around to kind of get more girls in STEM and get more girls in tech, and women working in tech and all this kind of stuff. And it just never, they just never seems to be a big uplift. So it's just kind of like, what trick are we missing? Like, clearly a lot of tricks. But yeah, it's just an especially, you know, especially like, as a woman like reading that. It's just, yeah, it's just yeah, it's just really, like, just disappointing to kind of read it time and time and time again, if you know what I mean.

Greg: Chris, Department of Education. So you must have all the answers for this.

Fay: Yeah c’mon Chris. 

Greg:  But I think even more because you know, the mentoring at uni, the kind of the work that you've done. Like, what, what's your view from this from that perspective, as somebody who supports people through education? 

Chris: I'm surprised by the percentages, because the work that I've been doing at Manchester at uni, has seen more females being involved in courses like user experience design, user research, project management, product management. So I was surprised by the statistics there. I think a big, big element of it is actually how many of them are taking the GCSE and then pursuing that? And is the GCSE putting people off or what's happening before that? I mean, you're back to the 50/50 split in food technology. When I was at school, we had the choice between woodwork and food technology. And I chose food technology on the premise of, would I rather go home after a day's work and cook myself something to eat or build myself a table and I was the only male in the class for two years. And you know,  that was difficult. But I think it is such a fundamental part of life now I'm very surprised that people don't want to delve into that at GCSE level.

Jonny: Yeah, it's a massive issue and like every stage of like every part of the like life journey into the industry, it’s like an issue. So you have great initiatives like InnovateHer which are helping. They go into schools, don't they, to try and drive up interest about this. But even from like, I mean, obviously it is interesting that they've just like just talking about gender from the man and woman perspective as well. So you'd imagine non binary folk are like, it would be an even smaller percentage as well. But it is very understandable that the societal idas is that this is what made him interested in and this is what women are interested in. So even at that stage, you have that point you have, then you have yet you might have classes where the computer science kids, maybe they're not viewed as cool. So you don't go into that. Or maybe it's all boys that you taught that a quiz about technology that can us Google's own girls. I remember from winning design agencies and trying to hire a high designer working with universities, and they would often talk about how at their level, so degree level, you would have project programmes like UX design, or product design would be a reason. I mean, that, obviously, what they class as a reasonable percentage, but you would see the percentage of women declining as you move towards more of the programmes that require development. But then even if you can overcome all of that, you get into the industry, and it's just shit if you’re a woman. It just isn't good. And you might go to some places that are good, but they're absolutely not the norm. And even the places that seem to be good, there might be just individuals at those places that are awful. This is just such a massive problem to try and overcome. And there are people tackling, I think many of those fans are like you said, Chris, in terms of your experience at the Met that has been really positive, and you've got things like InnovateHer, and you've got, you know, code camps, like Manchester code and Code Your Futures, which are trying to help underrepresented people get into the industry, and you have some really good employers as well. But it's just such a massive, massive problem to overcome, obviously not just in the tech sector. As well as it does happen in many, many other industries as well that were particularly bad at it. And yeah, it's depressing that it's not good. Like, what's that 2%, less than a 2% increase since 2009, is not good.

Greg: I wonder about that, though, you know, Chris's point and your point about those different projects and things. I wonder if if it's a bit of a miss, you know, kind of a misdirection, I wonder if the reason we're not seeing much of an increase in these courses is because they're so dated. Maybe they're not, you know, people aren't picking them up, because they're not interested in them. They're not, you know, they're old fashioned. And maybe the women of the world are going off and learning to code through these coding clubs and doing more, you know, things more on their own. Maybe they're doing, because there's a quote from a computer science teacher, Elizabeth English, who says a lot of kids male and female, love social media and YouTube. There are a couple of big gamer girls online. What if, you know, they're getting into tech through those channels and not through traditional, you know, IT courses? I mean, I don't know what it causes, or like at GCSE, GCSE level these days. But I know, you know, when I was in school, which is a long time ago, now, it was all like, here's how to use MS Word and that kind of stuff.,

Chris: Yeah, yeah. I also wonder if there's a career development thing here. At the age of 14, when you're choosing those options. Maybe you're thinking about how you're going to have a bit more fun in school, doing subjects like media studies and drama, physical education, that aren't just sat behind a desk or a computer all the time. And maybe there's more that needs to go into the planning and thinking about what people want to do as a career rather than it just being something that's thought about when they leave school and that might impact the qualifications that they choose to take.

Jonny: Yeah, I guess that is still grim now, in regards to the education point, is that the percentage of women employed in tech just has not moved. So regardless of who, what has moved, like 1.3%, in what’s that? 11 years, 12 years, is just grim. And I mean, you know, if you’ve worked at design agencies, you will be aware of like the layout of the office. So imagine being a woman who is a developer walking into an office for your interview, and everybody's a man. Like, immediately. It’s not the most inviting atmosphere, is it? So yeah, more to be done Greg, it seems. Should we move on to charity news of the week? Because this is a more positive story, I believe.

Greg: Yeah, I think this is, it’s got some positivity. There's some question marks as well. 

Fay: [laughs] 

Greg: So I don't know if anybody saw on social media, there was a picture of a young German girl who basically was at one of the games recently and Germany weren't doing so well and she was in tears and the response on social media was to basically hurl abuse at this young girl. So a Welsh football fan, Joel Hughes decided that he was going to show this young girl, her family and the world that not all football fans were arseholes. So he started a fundraiser and at the point of the article being written had raised more than #13,000 for the young girl. He had no idea at this stage who this young girl was and his intention was to try and track it down through social media, which is not all creepy. And weird. Yeah. But basically said if the girl's family were not found, he's going to donate the proceeds to a cause that is closely aligned with the spirit of the campaign.

Fay: I've just had a look actually. He has now raised 35k.

Greg: Woah. 

Fay: Yeah. So it has jumped. And I yeah, I saw this over the weekend and some of the comments, even just like some of the comments when it was like newspapers covering this story, were actually disgusting. Like don't get me wrong. I work in social media, been through the wringer in terms of community management and seeing what people will say behind the protection of their keyboard or whatever else. But some of them were just absolutely vile, like, shockingly vile, and you're like, oh, my god, she's crying, because her football team lost a match and you're basically wishing sexual abuse on her. Great, that makes you a wonderful human being. Like, it's just yeah, it's, it's just mind blowing. Like I say it's mind blowing. It happens all the time. But it still just shocks me sometimes, like the comments that people will like, write on social and just not even think about the consequences. But yeah, like, yeah, he's raised 35k.

Greg: Do we think 35k for this young woman is the right thing to do?

Jonny: I was gonna say. This isn’t the positive news story that I was promised [laughs] That's all horrible. Yeah, the first I saw of this was people on Instagram and Twitter talking about how weird or not surprising, is that this football thing raises such a huge ton of money. But I think I saw it alongside a photo of, that was shared on media quite a lot, of the Palestinian girl joining the bombings. That obviously didn't get much attraction and not a huge amount of people in the UK rallying to donate to that although obviously some did. So I think that was a comparison I saw, where everything about this is just weird. We increasingly hate football because of football fans. Like increasingly. I used to be a huge football fan, used to play a lot of football at a reasonable level. Hate it, hate it, because the fans. I absolutely hate it. And we were at Bex’s birthday at the weekend. So we were out of meal during the match and just like that, the town, the whole town was just like, destroyed by football fans. And you know, trying to walk home afterwards. We've played a game of trying to work out did England win or not based upon the fans. Because what was interesting was we walked out the restaurant, and there was a guy like collapsed, holding his hands in his head in the streets. And I thought, well that can't be a win and people seemed you know, depressed and was spilling out into the streets and doing fights and so I thought well, that's probably not a good thing. And then one guy passed us and looked us straight in the eye and went ‘cheer up, it’s fucking coming home. So I was like, I don't know, like that’s quite aggressive. 

Greg: [laughs] 

Jonny:  It's coming home suggests we’ve won.  We were convinced that we’d lost, even though we knew; this wasn’t the July match. This was the last match which they’d won. We were convinced that they’d taken the lead because at that point we were out. Just the whole thing was weird, around like the fans' attitude towards football is odd. But the fact that it can lead to like, yeah, you said a young girl who's upset. That level of extraordinary abuse is just gross.

Fay: Yeah. It's just, it's just mad and I know like, obviously this is a bigger issue isn't it, than just a young girl crying because the team has lost. Like, this is kind of you know, wading into that territory of like online abuse and using social media as a way to kind of you know, as a way to kind of like mobilise that abuse you know. It's just we know social media is dangerous like what happened last year and kind of like you know, DC and the Capitol and all this kind of stuff so it's when you see kind of examples like this where it can, you know, like an entire community and entire audience can be calm so inflamed over something such as a football match. And you know, the guy who's raising the money, Joel, I believe he’s called. Like, he's received online abuse as well. Like, I'm just looking at an article in the Metro here, which was about raising 35k and you know, he's people have contacted him going, I hope you and all your family get COVID and die the most painful death. It's like, It's yeah, it is a bigger issue about, about kind of, yeah, just online abuse. But I'm just really interested about what you were gonna say, Greg about, like, is raising the money for this girl the right thing to do?

Greg: Yeah. So these things never work out well. You know, the whole crowdfunder thing to give it to somebody who's seen it happen in the past with something's gone awry. 

Jonny: Are you suggesting that she's not a real little girl?

Greg: No. It's just that whole thing of taking money from people to then donate to an individual. You know, for those of us that have worked with charities, it's never never that simple, really. So yeah, I just do worry that Joel's let himself into a bit of a complicated situation. Now, if he doesn't find her, he'll donate that to causes, which I think will probably be a much more simple process for him. But yeah, what do we all think about that, because I just feel like it's a bit of a minefield. 

Jonny: The money aspect, it's just like a bit, you know, perfectly happy for them to get the money because it's horrible that they've been offered to go to a good cause, I guess a bit they do maybe like is that it has raised the profile of, this is an outrageous thing. I guess the downside to that is that it has further raised the profile and potentially increased the lifespan of her being a target, and also introduced him to that. But if it leads to people having a positive conversation about this is just not acceptable, then I guess that's a good thing. But I mean, again, like with the women in tech and the efforts to kick racism out of sport, you know, awareness campaigns just don't seem to do enough, in of itself, does it? I don't know how you fix the issue, which is its root cause of this tribe is against this tribe, so hates them with a passion. Whereas I'm sure if it had not been in the context of football, if one of these outrageously awful human beings who are posting these things, had just walked past a little girl in the street, probably wouldn't have started shouting and screaming at her. But when they're in this tribe of football, we hate them, we want them to die. And we see that, obviously, that happens really, in a really vicious way in football. But it happens in many other aspects of our society at the moment as well. Especially when we seem determined to break people into these two tribes and make them hate each other. This idea that people are just increasingly awful to people who are not them, or who are different from them. I don't know how you stop, that is a football thing. But it's more than that as well. You're like, have you got something to say Fay?

Fay: I was just reading an update. So they've actually, he's not going to donate it to the little girl. So they found the family and the family have said that they want to remain private and the daughter, so the little girl in question, has requested that all the donations go to UNICEF. So apparently, yeah, the 36k that they've raised now is actually now going to go to UNICEF. So that's interesting from what you were saying, Greg about, like, you know, the family have kind of gone whoa, this is possibly way too much attention, don't give it to us. Because if they took the money, would they then possibly face further backlash? Maybe. But, Chris, what do you reckon?

Chris: Yeah, you think about the long term future of this young girl, you know, she could be associated to that picture, which is bad enough and the mental scars that could cause but then also think about that being and then she received X amount of money, as almost compensation for that, when really we should be tackling the behaviour that that drives that. As you say, walk past a girl who was crying in the street because you just lost a teddy bear and hurl abuse at her so why should, you know, her being upset then manifest itself in that kind of behaviour? And that's, having worked in sport, that's not the power of sport. The power of sport can be incredible. It can unite people. It can give, it's a leveller, you know, people from all walks of life can be good at sport and get behind sport and that's what I enjoyed most about working in Olympic sport, because everyone was wearing the same jersey and behind the same team. There was no real rivalry. And you know, sport can do so much for good and it's a shame that this type of behaviour is now becoming common practice.

Greg: Yeah,it is a shame. Because, you know, sport has such a strong relationship with charity. And, you know, you look at like, Marcus Rashford and the work that he's done, and it's just, then, yeah, we see this and yeah, it does feel disappointing. 

Jonny: Yeah. But it sounds like a good resolution in the sense that the money is going to a charity and like you said, Greg, [laughs] it’s probably much, from a logistic challenge for poor Joel, that feels like a much easier thing to do. Should we move on to tech news of the week, which is that the NHS is handling our data and everything's okay, I believe.

Greg: Yeah. So although this says NHS data breach, there's not actually been a specific data breach. So basically there’s a report that’s come out. The Independent has been looking into this and they found that thousands of NHS patients have had their data wrongly shared with strangers, including a case where a person's HIV status was released. In one example, a stranger turned up at a woman's door to let her know her private details, including her address, had been sent to other patients. So statistics from the ICO show that over three and a half thousand personal data breaches were reported across the health sector. The majority within the NHS in the two years to 31st of March this year. So this story is not about an individual breach, it's about thousands of lots of varying sized breaches that have happened. 

Jonny: That’s worse. That’s worse. It’s like, it's not just one instance of incompetence. It's just universal. 

Greg: [laughs] Yeah. And this is why I wanted to raise it, because this is not about like, the Facebook style thing, where it's kind of big database that's kind of got out there. This is about the bit that GDPR that everybody forgets, which is that responsibility is not just down to the database owner’s job. It's not just down to the organisation as a whole, there's many, many layers to this and you look at the kinds of breaches that have happened in this case with the NHS, and you know, it's right down to the GPs, and people that are working with patients making errors. And I just thought it was really important to highlight that because it's not just an individual person's job to protect data. It’s everybody's job.

Jonny: Yeah. We had uh, because I have epilepsy, I have to have regular appointments, and sometimes you can make them, sometimes you get sent a text, do you want to rebook it or cancel it? So there's one reasonably recently where I chose to rebook so I typed rebook and sent it, and then never got another appointment. But I did get a letter from my consultant, saying, oh, thank you. So it’s addressed to your doctor but it goes to you. It had someone else’s name in it but it came to me and said, you know, Bill has attended my clinic and then it gave an overview of the examination that happened. I was like, what, how has that happened? How does it happen? It's come to my address. My name is on it. But it's then got different patient information on it that’s now been sent to my doctor. It's like a multipronged lapse of data governance. It’s just terrible.

Greg: It's called a clusterfuck. 

Jonny: That, I think is the word that it says on the ICO website, isn't it? 

Fay: [laughs] 

Jonny: Yeah. 

Fay: Technical term. 

Jonny: What do we do? Is it fixable? 

Greg: No [laughs] Probably not. That this is one of those big cultural challenges of, you know, you've got to make the tech work but then you've got to make sure that people are using tech in the right way. So for example, between April 29th and March 2021, there are 866 instances in which personal data was emailed or physically posted to the wrong person. So you could argue that maybe there's a system issue there, that they had the wrong details, but there's a likelihood as well, that that's human error, where someone's input the wrong email address, or input too many email addresses. Done a reply to all job. So yeah, it's one of those complex, multi-layered issues, which is compounded by one of those, you know, the challenges that many public sector organisations face. Which is really, you know, old tech, that's hard to change, that's really integral to the way that it's structured and, you know, moving away from that and changing those things is a big challenge. And the NHS have struggled with that in the past. They're getting better, right? But it's, it's, yeah, it's constantly a challenge. And it's not like they've got a terrible team. They've got some great people working there. But it's just one of those things where it's a big beast, and you've got to get everybody working on the same page.

Jonny: What I like about this, obviously I mean, I don't like it in the sense that it’s good, is that like 3587 data breaches were reported. Again, it’s numbers and the statistics, and it can be easy to forget how dangerous that is, and like on a personal level.  So the personal story you put out there around, you know, one of the situations is a person's HIV status was released, is just like, that kind of thing can be absolutely devastating to people and really, really dangerous to people as well. Like it's just absolutely frightening. You can also sympathise and be aware of what the technical infrastructure can be at organisations like the NHS and the BBC and things like that can be an absolute nightmare to manage but you have to do better.  You just can't have these kinds of lapses. It's just so, so dangerous. Yeah. I don't know if anyone has any thoughts. 

Fay: Clusterfuck really isn’t it. I think the word sums it up pretty well. Yeah, it’s a difficult one. Because it's, as you're sort of saying, it's such a, it's such a beast to kind of get to the bottom of. But it's like these, you know, your example Jonny, of it's like, it was addressed to you, but it was somebody else's letter, but it was then sent to you. It's just like, how does that? How's it? Yeah, how does that even happen? It's yeah, I don't know. It's a tricky one. Chris, what do you think?

Chris: Yeah, in an industry that you'd expect that kind of level of diligence and, you know, checking stuff that goes in the post things like that is a concern, isn't it? It's an obvious concern. And if anything, that, you know, good could come out of it. Hopefully, there's a number of other organisations that people who work for, you know, similar types of organisations that deal with sensitive data, that take note and start to change the way that they behave and, you know, acts as a real warning to them to make sure that these things are minimised to the best that possibly can. You know, humans are exactly that. We make mistakes. But there should be things in place to make sure that these things don't happen.

Greg: Yeah, my worry is it's going to be like that, that's going to come out the digital and data teams are going to be scrambling around, like answering questions, things like that and there's going to be many people who are responsible for some of this stuff, that they're probably just going to forget about it and move on and be like, oh, that was terrible. But there's not much we can do about it, so let's not worry about it. It's like, yes, you've got to have that. It's tough, but you've got to have it on, you know, in your mind at all times, like how do we stop these things happening? How do we improve them? And when things don't work, have the space to kind of say, this isn't working, how do we make it better?

Chris: Yeah, consequence often a really high level from an organisation. So it doesn't necessarily impact an individual who's doing that. So you know, if someone is hung over or not paying that much attention in any organisation and makes a mistake like that, the consequences can be massive. And I'm not sure that there's enough attention paid to that. That you know, you're doing a specific job and that you're responsible for the quality of your work and your output.

Jonny: Yeah. And time and underfunding as well. Like the story I talked about in the epilepsy department. My experience as an epilepsy patient for the last 20 years has mostly been really, really grim. But it's not been because the individuals have been excellent that I've met. Just so unbelievably underfunded, you know, and so incredibly stretched. The last appointment I went to was one where they stick these kind of electrodes on your head and flash strobe lights at you, which is great [laughs] 

Fay: I was gonna say, doesn't sound great for somebody with epilepsy [laughs] 

Jonny: Not great fun but they set it up. And when I showed up, actually, there was just no one there. It was locked up. Pitch black. Had to go knock on different departments and they got someone because they were understaffed. So someone was kind of doing two jobs. And they put you on the sofa. And she spent ages putting these things in. It's like a really rubbish job to have to do. And then turned it on and I heard through Windows XP boot up sound, and because you can see the back of the computer. She’d come from a hospital, I think in London, which was great, had all the bells and whistles. And I was like, I'm still getting used to the fact that we're using this kinda computer. Then it didn't work. It was broken. So we both had to move the sofa to a different room to hook up to a different computer that again, was Windows XP, and I was like, do it. She'll be excellent. The training that she’d have been through to get to that stage and she was absolutely wonderful and I was so apologetic. I'm like, don't worry, you've been dealt a raw hand. You can imagine that this is the case all over the NHS, I'm sure there'll be incompetence, and there will be dreadful tech infrastructure as well. But also people probably just have no time to do things properly. Just, yeah. But it can't happen. It just can't happen. Fun. Facebook, though, I don't have a segue for the NHS to Facebook, because one organisation is wonderful and the other is the devil. They have done well in court, is that right Greg? 

Greg: Yeah. So there are a number of different cases currently happening in regards to antitrust in the US at the moment but the most recent one. So the US District Judge James Boalsburg in Washington, basically granted Facebook's request to dismiss complaints that were filed last year by the US Federal Trade Commission and State Attorney Generals. Basically the reason he's done this is because they failed to meet the burden for establishing that Facebook has monopoly in social networking.

Fay: [laughs] What the fuck? Sorry, sorry, Greg, continue. 

Greg: no, go on. 

Fay: It's just, how, I mean, Facebook. I haven't sorry, forgive me, I haven't read the article. And that’s my own fault. Sorry for not being a prepared podcast guest. But like, how can you fail to recognise that Facebook has a monopoly in like social net? Like it is constantly, it's constantly been top of like, the number of users for years and years and it's not just Facebook. It's Instagram and it's WhatsApp and they monetize everything. How can, how have they not met, that just blows my mind?.

Greg: Well, I'm glad you asked.

Fay: Oh [laughs] 

Greg: There's a very specific reason why the judges have done that and because under the current definition of antitrust, he hasn't, they haven't met the burden, because that definition does not include anything around what Facebook is doing. Because it's out of date. 

Fay: Oh my God. 

Greg: So basically, what he's saying is, if we meet the measure of the law, there's nothing, based on what you've currently given me there's nothing you can do. 

Fay: Fucking hell. 

Greg: What this doesn't cover is that at the same time, there is work going on in the American government to redress that to look at antitrust laws and look at the new monopolies at which point they would be able to take that through the courts. But I think what the judge is saying here is that under the current definitions of monopoly, Facebook doesn't meet that requirement. 

Fay: [exhales] Jesus. 

Greg: Yeah. And it's all down to the purchasing power. It's all tied up in money and effects in the markets and increasing prices and things like that. And because it's free, it doesn't do any of that And that's why monopoly antitrust laws are out of date. 

Fay: Right. That answers my question then [laughs]

Jonny: On the plus side, they are a wonderful company though, who only just want to connect the world Greg. That’s all they want to do. They just want to connect people. They want everyone just to be in touch and to you know, have great relationships and to make the world a happier, better place. So what could go wrong? And you know, they’re run by a great, totally not robotic person, you know. They’ve not damaged the very nature of democracy across the world.

Greg: Did you see him on the whiteboard with the American flag?

Jonny: No, what was that? 

Greg: There was a video of him on this weird board thing, basically with an American flag. 

Fay: Oh my God. Yeah.

Greg: It was really weird. 

Fay: It was really weird. It was really weird. Just talking about Zuckerberg being robotic, I don't know if anyone's ever seen it, but like, oh God, the creators of South Park, they did like a deep, viral deep fake a while ago about a guy called Sassy Justice, which was like Donald Trump, a Donald Trump deep fake. But as part of that, Mark Zuckerberg was like, they did Mark Zuckerberg as well as though he was selling dialysis to like, yeah, to medical patients. It’s really weird. It's on the internet, but it's really funny, but it's just yeah, it just reminded me of you saying that he's really robotic, because he isn't, he's dead behind the eyes. I know a lot of people who are and maybe maybe I am but like, 

Jonny: That’s on the inside. He's just behind the eyes. You're dead on the inside. 

Fay: [laughs] That’s true. Thanks for the clarification.

Jonny: Easy mistake to make. But it does sound like if they were able to get a legal case together, they might still be in a spot. Like it's a reprieve for now, isn't it? But the suggestion is that they are able to better, I guess, bring together their legal arguments about it being a monopoly. Because like Fay said, in some ways it seems very clear that they are but I guess the nuances of the legal system can make it tough to prove. 

Greg: Yeah, yeah. And I just wonder whether under the current laws whether they'd be able to do that, I think currently wouldn't be classed as a monopoly even though we all know it's a monopoly. But there you go. So it's reliant on it being passed through the House, the Senate and kind of the laws being changed. There are some you know, there's some confidence that that will happen. Both the left and the right have serious issues with them. And of course this has huge impacts on us because we in the UK can't break them up. No one anywhere else in the world can break them up. It's the responsibility of the US government to sort that out in this weird globalisation world that we live in.

Jonny: Yeah, I mean, can you really be a monopoly in social media when there are other organisations like MySpace and Google+ doing so well? Impossible! Do we, did we have a rant or nice of the week? Is there a positive news story Greg, we can talk about?

Greg: I, unfortunately, do not have any positivity in my life at the minute.

Fay: [laughs] 

Greg: It’s been a bad few days guys. 

Fay: Oh, Greg. 

Jonny: Chris or Fay, have you seen anything nice in the world of tech? 

Chris: No, it's been a struggle these last few weeks, if I'm perfectly honest. I’ve not seen anything that's made me even remotely think about smiling, let alone get a grin on my face.

Fay: oh God [laughs] 

Greg: I'll tell you one thing I did see. 

Fay: [laughs] go on Greg. 

Greg: I did see one thing. In Norway they've introduced a law which means that anybody manipulating or editing a photo for social media, so projecting unreasonable body image is one example, has to put a disclaimer, attach a disclaimer to that image, to try and tackle this kind of body dysmorphia thing where everybody's trying to look like Instagram people, when actually it's been photoshopped. So yeah, I thought that was really good. We'll wait to see if that has much impact, you know whether that disclaimer helps. But yeah, I thought that was great.

Jonny: It's an interesting approach, isn't it? Social media companies won’t prevent behaviour that's unhelpful or outrageous on social media. Localised laws that they have to adhere to, you know, you know, that Facebook had different policies for, you know, the UK because of GDPR than they had in the US. And Twitter were more aggressive at removing Nazis in Germany cause it's a crime than they were everywhere else. So, you know, they won't show any kind of moral fibre, you know, tech industry level. Interesting to see if this sort of stuff does work, where the countries themselves are able to make it a crime. That's interesting. Would that hold, would that hold the individual accountable as well? So if that was an Instagram, for example, the Norway situation, would it be the individual who would be breaking the law or would Instagram also be trouble for that? Like, are they obliged to stop it themselves? 

Greg: Yeah. So it's the individual's responsibility, because obviously, they're the ones that are going to be manipulating the imagery, then it's their responsibility to kind of flag I guess, there may be some capability from from the likes of Instagram to identify images that have been manipulated and not flagged with the disclaimer. But whether they'll do that, I don't know.

Jonny: Yeah, because they have to sort of say that, am I right, around Instagram, that influencers have to say, if they're being paid for sponsorship? 

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jonny: Interesting. Cool. I had a rant, but everything's too grim. So I think we skip that. 

Fay: [laughs] 

Jonny: It was around, no, we should talk about it. I saw it today. Which is a Tic Tok user called Ziggi Tyler. 

Greg: Oh my God. 

Jonny: Did you see this around?

Greg: Yeah. 

Jonny: He is a Tic Toc user wanted to put up, I think it was a paid ad, I think, I guess is what he was trying to do on Tic Toc platform. And he wrote some text and like the last sentence of it, so it's about he wants to support dot dot dot. So if he said he wants to support white supremacy, Tic Toc would agree with the ad. Deletes the word, white supremacy. If you put black life matters, it says that it's inappropriate content. If he says black people, it's inappropriate content. Anything and he tried multiple things. If you put white power, that's acceptable. So literally the entire use, you can see as he deletes and types these new words in, nope you’re not allowed to do that.  It’s inappropriate. It’s unbelievably, again, that situation where it's not surprising anymore is it? It’s absolutely outrageous.

Greg: The worst factor about that was, he got down to, so he could leave every other word. But if he swapped white for black, it wouldn't allow him. So he could put white supremacy switch it for black, it wouldn't allow it. So that was the bit where it was like, it's not even looking for terms. It's looking for that specific word. I think we've spoken previously on the podcast about algorithms not allowing the use of certain terms and the kind of response from the likes of Facebook was while we've got you know, a list of terms and these have just been missed off. So we've added all of these terms now and that included some, you know, kind of black lives term. So theirs was like a scorched earth approach. It was like well if you're going to find these we're going to add every single one and we're going to remove access to it. So yeah, it's how we got to this point where they're allowing white supremacy but blocking anything related to black lives matter? It's just obscene.

Chris: and these things are designed by accident either. These are designed by humans who are thinking along those lines and it is just disgusting to even have to kind of think about those things, let alone them being out there in the world for people to be, you know, abusing and using like that.

Greg: It's common sense. Like, you’re gonna get pulled up on this at some point. Like, people are gonna work it out [laughs]

Jonny: They don’t care. They just don't care. They don't care. They absolutely do not give a fuck. That's the truth on my Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok. They just don't care. Don't care about doing right. They'll do what makes them the most money and that's it. And there's a lot of money in hate, unfortunately.  So that was Ziggi Tyler. Go check him out on Tic Tok and say some nice things and be supportive. That would be wonderful. Talking of money Shopify have, Shopify have removed costs for the first million. Have I read that right, Greg? Do i need to make a million to have to do well?

Greg: So if you have a shop on Shopify, they will not charge you for the first million pounds, first million dollars that you make and this resets annually, so every year. So for those smaller retailers who are using Shopify, including charities. Many charities use Shopify as a sales platform. This is awesome news.

Jonny: My time has come. I make jewellery made from my own hair. Not yet hit a million dollars but when I do, kerching! In two ways, I’ve made a million dollars, but also I don't have to pay Shopify as much. So that's fun.  But this is a charity connection I see now. So this is a good thing for charities?

Greg: Yeah, yeah. Charities, small businesses, you know, that whole thing of not having to pay those costs is massive for them. Particularly, Shopify. It is one of the better platforms, but it's, you know, it obviously was a bit more expensive. But this could have huge, huge potential for people now.

Jonny: We are out of time but that is a lovely story, in terms of, from the charity perspective. So all those charities who listen so keenly to this podcast, if you've just tipped into the million dollars, as you are listening to us, good news. You don't have to pay Shopify quite as much. So that's good news. I do need to wrap up, unfortunately, but because that is all we have time for. Chris, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Hopefully, that was fun. Maybe. I mean, it was mostly upsetting stuff that we thought we talked about, but it was fun having you here to talk these things through. So where can people find you online?

Chris: So I try to stay away as much as they can from social media. But the one that I do use is Twitter and you can find me at badly drawn burns. 

Jonny: Wonderful. And listeners, what did you think? We would love to hear your thoughts, get in touch on Twitter, we are at Tech for good live, or you can email us, which is Hello at Tech for goes live. My mom would love it if you left a really nice iTunes review for us as well. So go away and do that and tell your friends all about this podcast. You know, that's what we do. We get together and we meet our mates and we talk about podcasts. I'm sure that's a natural situation that will happen for you. So tell them all about this one. Thank you to our producers who produce this podcast and have to edit out all of my nonsense. And this podcast is entirely run by a team of volunteers and we survive on sponsorships and donations. If you have a big wad of cash and want to sponsor us, you can do that. Nothing better to do with the money, there's better things to do with the money. But one thing we want to try and insist on is all of our podcast transcripts, all of our podcast episodes are transcribed which is quite a lot of work and costs money. So we do need some help to make this a reality. If you've ever wanted to help us, if you tune into the podcast, so if you attend our events, please do consider chipping in for the price of a cup of coffee. You can go to tech for good dot live forward slash donate and you can give us some, a little bit of cash that we can transcribe these episodes. That would be wonderful. Thank you to Podcast.co for hosting guys. And that is everything. So I will say goodbye and everyone else can say goodbye. 

All: Bye.