"Through the effective and appropriate management of records held in all formats we can operate more efficiently, better serve our stakeholders and protect our legal interests."
n today's digital era, governments across the globe are amassing larger amounts of data than ever before. Some of this is structured data such as census records, phone numbers, addresses, and any information that can easily be entered into a database or spreadsheet. And some of it is unstructured data, or harder-to-analyze information such as emails, documents, web pages, photos, and videos.
The Getting Things Done method rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.
"Google subsidiary DeepMind has accomplished some amazing things over the past couple of years, from beating humans at their own game to saving its parent company money on its electricity bill. Now, however, it's coming under major scrutiny because of the specifics of a deal with the United Kingdom's National Health Service."
Our local hospital is part of the Royal Free Trust (the body that gave Deepmind MY data). The trust has never consulted me on this. I don't care whether it has a legal duty to do so or not, I believe it has a moral obligation to tell me what it is doing and why. Deepmind may have altruistic public health motives (hmmm), but this silence is destroying trust (pardon the pun). It's about time the data Ombudsmen did their job.