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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#321

Post by braiamp »

dash2 wrote: post #216
g-mork wrote: post #89

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction…

I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behin…

Yeah, this is a common problem with these kinds of issues. Data can be open, data can be available, but if it's not easily exploitable and parseable by anyone there will always be a third party that would do so for a premium. Data has to be ready for consumption when shared by the state. That's why one of my very strong objections that we divide datasets by year on a continuous registry. It should be one dataset with a single column that tells you the year the row corresponds to.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#322

Post by ajb »

dash2 wrote: post #216
g-mork wrote: post #89

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction…

I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behin…

Hansard is a great example, because originally parliament did not allow publication of its proceedings; to get round this "Several editors used the device of reporting on parliamentary debates under the veil of debates of fictitious societies or bodies. The names under which parliamentary debates were published include Proceedings of the Lower Room of the Robin Hood Society and Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia."

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#323

Post by autoexec »

jjk166 wrote: post #221
autoexec wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. It's perfectly valid to say that…

> Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. If all you care about is preventing the information from being abused, preventing it from being used is a great…

> The fact that the access speedbump which supposedly worked in the past is no longer good enough is proof that an access speedbump is not a good way to do it.

It worked well enough for a pretty long time. No solution can be expected to work forever, we just need to modify the restrictions on criminal histories to keep up with the times. It's perfectly normal to have to reassess and make adjustments to access controls over time, not only because of technology changes, but also to take into account new problems with the use/misuse of the data being restricted and our changing values and expectations for how that data should be used and accessed.

> If you don't want algorithms to come to spurious and discriminatory conclusions, you must make algorithms auditable, and give the public reasonable access to interrogate these algorithms that impact them.

I think we'd have much better success restricting access to the data than handing it out freely and trying to regulate what everyone everywhere does with that data after they already have it. AI in particular will be very hard to regulate (as much as I agree that transparent/auditable systems are what we want), and I don't expect we'd have much success regulating what companies do behind closed doors or force them to be transparent about their use of AI

We both agree that companies should be held liable for the discriminatory outcomes of their hiring practices no matter if they use AI or not. The responsibility should always fall on the company and humans running the show no matter what their tools/processes are since they decide which to use and how to use them.

We also agree that discrimination itself should be outlawed, but that remains an unsolved problem since detection and enforcement are extremely difficult. It's easier to limit the opportunity to discriminate than try to catch companies in the act. You mention that hiding people's race doesn't work, but that's actually being explored as a means to avoid bias in hiring. For example, stripping names and addresses (which can hint at race) before passing resumes to algorithms seems like it could help reduce unintentional discrimination.

Ultimately, there'll always be opportunities for a bigot to discriminate in the hiring process but I think we can use a multifaceted approach to limit those opportunities and hopefully force them to act more explicitly making deliberate discrimination a little easier to catch.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#324

Post by owisd »

dash2 wrote: post #216
g-mork wrote: post #89

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction…

I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behin…

The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully understand a piece of legislation he was voting on, yet was expected by the whips to vote on multiple pieces of legislation every week, but most people wave an MP's voting record around like they 100% understood and agree with everything they voted on, despite it being mathematically impossible. If they'd voted differently would it have changed the outcome? Was it even a binding motion? Most of the real debate in the UK Parliament happens beforehand anyway and the government will withdraw any votes they know they're going to lose before it even gets into the chamber so the real rebellions don't even get recorded on theyworkforyou.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#325

Post by 999900000999 »

Polizeiposaune wrote: post #128
999900000999 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything should remain absolutely private until after conviction. And only released if it's in the public interest. I'd be very very strict here. I'm a bit weird here though. I basically think the criminal justice system is very harsh. Except when it comes to driving. With driving, at least in America, our laws are a joke. You can have multiple at fault accidents and keep your license. DUI, keep your license. Run i…

Arrests being a matter of public record are a check on the government's ability to make people just disappear. But the Internet's memory means that something being public at time t1 means it will also be public at all times after t1.

They can disappear you indefinitely regardless.

Democrats love it too.

They call em Jump Outs. Historically the so called constitution has been worth less than craft paper. From FDRs executive order 9066 to today, you have no rights.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#326

Post by Muromec »

mikkupikku wrote: post #316
Muromec wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we as a society decided it creates externalities we don't want to deal with. With a list of exceptions where it actually is important because risk-reward balance is too much.

We as a society have decided no such thing, it is in fact legal to refuse somebody a job for having a criminal history, and will remain so.

that depends on a society, right?

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#327

Post by Muromec »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #313
Muromec wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself. Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account. Good conduct certificates are there…

> pdf files Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies. We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.

I actually find this amusing and do it because I like to. We are witnessing the new tabooed word, where the usual sacrilege doesn't hit the nerve anymore.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#328

Post by niels8472 »

alberto467 wrote: post #187
niels8472 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the accused have rights too?

Where the journalists have very little rights, and people posting their bad (wrong) ideas (think) even less so.

Not according to the wpfi world press freedom index where it is ranked 20th.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#329

Post by BurningFrog »

AngryData wrote: post #310
BurningFrog wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mostly is. People really do have personalities.

Except it will inevitably lead to discrimination and abuse as it always has in the past. How much of the US justice system is based on harassing poor communities using that kind of excuse? Even if one community is actually less likely to commit crimes than another, if you send 90% of your policing forces there, using the excuse they it is just the way they are and things don't change much, you will find 90% of your c…

I actually think it's good to be able to discriminate against people with bad character.

If you can know the character of individual people, you have less reason to discriminate against those from statistically higher criminal communities.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#330

Post by dirasieb »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #305
dirasieb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely fucking crazy that you call accurately describing the reality of AI scraping "absolutely fucking crazy" while at the same time going "who cares?" on attacks against journalism and free speech. >Oh no, some musician died, PASS THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT, LOCK DOWN ALL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMINALS, JAIL JOURNALISTS!!!!

> on attacks against journalism and free speech. "Free speech" is some kind of terminal brain worm that begs itself to be invoked to browbeat most anybody into submission, I suppose. Now we're apparently extending "free speech" to mean "the government must publish sensitive private information about every citizen in an easily-scraped manner". Well, I don't buy your cheap rhetorical trick. I support freedom of speech…

next time you should read what the thread is about before commenting, this is not about "wanting the government to publish X", it's about the government ordering a private company to delete, from their own servers, data that the government had published

it's a clear cut free speech issue, you just don't want to admit it since certain data being available and spread to other people doesn't suit your political ideology

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