As a member of the Guardianista class, I naturally subscribe to the view that our civil liberties are in danger. Asbos, no-jury trials, public order legislation and detention without charge all find me wringing my hands and quoting ancient texts about English liberties. But on one point, I remain strangely unmoved. I cannot get exercised about my DNA being put on a national database. I do not feel an instant repulsion as I do to locking people up without charge. I am, therefore, sympathetic to the proposal this month from Lord Justice (Stephen) Sedley that, if we must have a database, everyone should be on it.
This is for two reasons. First, the four million whose DNA is at present stored, even if they have been cleared of any crime, are drawn disproportionately from the poor and from ethnic minorities. So already disadvantaged groups now have a greater chance of being apprehended for any crime than more privileged members of society. Second, the fuss about what information the government holds misses something bigger and equally worrying. What will the government do with our DNA? The usual answer is that it could be used for ethnic cleansing. But the Nazis managed that without DNA databases. Those bent on genocide tend not to be inhibited by lack of precise evidence.
Think, though, of how life insurance, pension or private health care companies might use DNA records. Is there anything to stop them demanding samples when we take out policies, and denying cover if we don’t oblige? I should hope so, but we have not so far been particularly vigilant in restricting the information that private corporations hold.
For many of us, encounters with the state are infrequent. If you’re healthy, childless, waged and law-abiding, they may be confined to a few brief formalities such as the driving licence or the electoral register. You will use mobile phones, supermarkets, emails, search engines, Oyster cards, bank accounts and credit cards far more often. These reveal the most intimate details: your friends, your interests, what you buy, where you travel, how often you go into debt. Where this information ends up is supposedly restricted by the Data Protection Act, but somehow that doesn’t reassure me. In most areas of law – employment rights and sex discrimination, for example – public bodies, almost to a fault, tend to observe rules more carefully than private firms. Following the rule book, after all, comes naturally to the public sector.
Companies are interested, it is said, not in individuals but in using buying habits to identify broad consumer categories – aspirant young muesli eaters, sad old cream-cracker nibblers, or whatever. Firms can then market to potential customers more efficiently. Members of the public receive information only about what is likely to interest them.
Minority tastes are more precisely identified, banishing the old greengrocer’s cry that “there’s no demand for it, madam”. Yet I still find it spooky that some marketing whizz-kid can work out that, if I buy organic walnuts, I might also care for pomegranate juice. I find it even spookier that the marketing departments’ computers reckon to know, just from my postcode, pretty well everything about me.
In the current issue of the journal Sociology, Mike Savage and Roger Burrows, professors at Manchester and York Universities respectively, point out that the data available to company market research departments now dwarves that gathered by academics. A telecoms company doesn’t need a sample survey if it wants to research, say, social networks; it has several years’ records of every phone call made on its system.
This worries sociologists because it might put them out of business. It worries me for a slightly different reason. In a fascinating new book, The Social Atom (Cyan/Marshall Cavendish), the science journalist Mark Buchanan argues that, thanks to modern computing power, game theory and better understanding of evolution, we are on the brink of a “quantum revolution” in the social sciences. We can develop laws, he thinks, to explain patterns of human behaviour, attaining what David Hume, 270 years ago, called “a science of human nature”. He hopes public policy can then “manage” us more “effectively”.
This sounds nasty, and perhaps it is. But public policy has been trying to manage us since Victorian times, often achieving the opposite of what it intends. It may as well get it right and, if it shows signs of doing so, we may all take democracy more seriously. What we haven’t noticed is that unaccountable private corporations, with much more computing power and data than the public sector, have also been trying to manage us. Their aim is to make us shop till we drop, mainly for things we can’t afford and don’t need, and, judging by the past 15 years, they’ve succeeded brilliantly. In fact, the corporations don’t need our DNA. They’ve got us sussed already.
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