Government obsession with Twitter leads to hassle again
While State Secretary for Digital Affairs Alexandra van Huffelen (D66) on Thursday in the National Meeting Room was filleted by Renske Leijten (SP) and Pieter Omtzigtone of her civil servants pressed the send button to answer parliamentary questions from the same Leijten.
In October last year became known that the Ministries of Social Affairs, Agriculture, the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, the Tax and Customs Administration (How!?) and the Social Cultural Planning Office collect and analyze Twitter messages on a large scale to gauge responses to policy in society. This is problematic because those Twitter users have not given permission and the government’s actions may therefore be illegal, as according to the privacy law (GDPR) no data may be processed without informing those involved (The issue is somewhat similar to previous affairs at the NCTV). That same month, Leijten asked parliamentary questions.
After an earlier delay, Van Huffelen had promised to answer it before the Christmas recess, but exceeded the response time of two times three weeks last Thursday so with two months.
The reason Van Huffelen writes is that she first had to call off all those responsible ministries: “Whether concrete processing of personal data and the way in which the tools available on the market are used for this task also meet the requirements in all cases mentioned by the questioner? principles in the GDPR, such as a lawful basis, transparency, purpose limitation, necessity, proportionality and subsidiarity must be determined on a case-by-case basis.” That is Hague for: Me and the rest have no idea.
But Van Huffelen is like her net stockings so she has a solution: she will ask her colleagues to ‘map out the use of social media monitoring by means of a DPIA’.
DPIA stands for Data Protection Impact Assessment. The explanation of the privacy watchdog Authority for Personal Data: “This is an instrument to identify the privacy risks of data processing in advance. And then to be able to take measures to reduce the risks.” Note the word prior to.
Well, this issue will be continued. The House of Representatives can therefore look forward to various DPIAs in the near future with – as is customary in government and ICT – undoubtedly damning conclusions. That would be laughable if it turns out that the government should have asked each individual Twitter user for permission to analyze his or her messages.
The question remains why the government attaches such importance to what is said on Twitter, the microblog can certainly not be called a cross-section of society. Isn’t that interesting a platform that is mainly populated by anonymous jerks, politicians, journalists and other born idlers?
