The Opportunity Report

Delete personal data? Y/N

Normally, the announcement of proposals from the European Commission excite nobody save the right-wing tabloids, however "Regulation on the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data” is likely to affect every EU citizen and every business and has been described as the biggest, most impactful piece of legislation that the European Union could produce without developing tax powers.

The proposed law has three objectives:

• to make it easier for companies to do business in Europe;
• to give individuals greater control over their personal information; and
• to give Europeans what has been dubbed the “right to be forgotten”.

The proposal would force all companies to get explicit consent from customers to collect their data, explain how it will be used, and allow users to totally erase their information. Failure to comply could cost a company a fine of up to one million euros or 2% of annual turnover. In part this is already enshrined in existing Data Protection rules but this makes it more explicit.

With each country in the 27-state European Union enforcing its own data protection laws, the legislation would create a single EU law for all nations as well as companies offering services in Europe, even if servers are based overseas. The proposed regulation should make it easier for the relevant national agencies to force organisations to comply with a time limit on how long they may store data before having to ask for permission to hold on to it for longer.

This kind of sunset clause is designed to make people think about their personal data and where it resides. An individual might decide to extend the life of his data, but having to do so actively will remind him of the presence and scale of his online data.  Giving people greater control over their information in an era of social networking websites and cloud computing, is expected to give greater confidence with respect to storing things online.

From a corporate perspective, this proposal may well impose an onerous burden:

• Marketing systems will need to be adapted to better seek permission to store personal data.
• It may well prove to be impossible to delete a piece of information completely and there will need to be limits to the liability of data holders.
• There are also questions about the ownership of data and where to draw the line between an individual customer’s data and the companies own.
• Companies will also have to appoint a data protection officer, a requirement that already exists in Germany.

Nevertheless, any attempt to make companies take their data seriously is to be welcomed and there is an upside. A company will only have to deal with one single data protection authority ie the data protection authority of the member state in which the company has its main establishment. It will not matter anymore which data protection authority deals with a case. All data protection authorities in whatever EU country will have the same adequate tools and powers to enforce EU-law. Overall it is expected to save businesses 2.3 billion euros a year by eliminating the mountain of red tape that companies must navigate currently.

The legislative process is likely to take at least two years, so the rules could still change considerably. Companies are unlikely be required to comply before 2014 or 2015, after legislation has been approved by national governments.

Photograph by Mike Tobin under a creative commons license

Superfast

According to the European Commission, Internet data traffic is growing by 60% every year. We already rely on the Internet to deliver many essential services but we rely upon the availability of ever faster broadband.

In June 2010 the Government said its goal was for the UK to have "the best superfast broadband network in Europe" by 2015, and talked about most of the country gaining access to superfast broadband speeds. In a keynote speech at the National Digital Conference today, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said the ambition of the coalition is for 90 per cent of the UK to have access to broadband of at least 25Mbps by 2015.

This is not a pledge it is an ambition. It is important to make that distinction particularly at a time when what we all assumed to be pledges in manifestos turn out to be less substantial. Actually it relies upon Local Authorities bidding for money to make it happen. So, if you live in an area where the local administration is forward looking and understands the vital importance of broadband infrastructure you might be in with a chance. On the other hand, if your councillors are sitting around waiting for those manufacturing jobs to come back you might be unlucky. If you think the balance between those two poles will lead to 90% coverage by 2015 I envy your optimism. 

If you sit outside the “superfast footprint” – and an estimated 10% of homes and businesses do - you will be guaranteed access to at least 2Mbps broadband by 2015, a “target” inherited from the last Government.

In Europe - in a move designed to enrage readers of the Daily Express (not difficult) - the first phase of a €600 million public-private partnership on the Internet of the Future has been launched by the European Commission. This partnership will support innovation in Europe and help businesses and governments to develop internet solutions that will be capable of managing an exponential increase in online data. 

Currently Europe is pretty slow, particularly by Asian standards. The data box shows figures from Akamai's State of the Internet 2011 report. Umea is the fastest city in Europe on average, but it is only 20th in their global rankings which are dominated by South Korea and Japan. 

The EU 2020 target is internet speeds of 30 Mbps or above for all European citizens, with half European households subscribing to connections of 100Mbps or higher. Currently only 1% of Europeans have a fast fibre-based internet connection, compared to 12% of Japanese and 15% of South Koreans. However, rather than relying upon Local Authorities, the EU is approaching the problem through attractive credit for broadband providers.

This, combined with tools that will be developed by the partnership, looks to be a significantly more solid way of meeting those broadband targets.

Baschurch and the Big Society

Since the Beeching cuts of the early sixties removed their station, Baschurch has had an infrastructure problem.  Some 10 miles north of Shrewsbury and 15 miles from the M54, the 1,500 population have, hitherto, been off the pace in the connectivity stakes. This is all about to change. Baschurch has been named by BT as one of six superfast broadband hubs to be delivered in 2012. This follows a nationwide contest to discover where there is greatest demand to get online. Well done them.

The six communities which garnered the highest proportion of support from their residents were Baschurch, Blewbury in Oxfordshire, Caxton and Madingley in Cambridgeshire, Innerleithen in Tweeddale and Whitchurch in Hampshire. Each will get a broadband hub by early 2012 that will allow download speeds of up to 40 megabits per second.

BT is spending £2.5bn on its network to reach two-thirds of homes by 2015 and the project is part of a publicly funded drive to get broadband to all parts of the UK. £830m will be diverted from BBC licence fee revenues over the next seven years to help pay for extending fibre networks to rural areas.

The UK Government wants every community to be within reach of high-speed digital infrastructure using optical fibre by 2015 – potentially, a more ambitious target than the 2Mbps aspiration offered by the previous administration. The Government wants local authorities to bid for public subsidies to build the broadband hubs though how this fits with the financial straightjacket planned for the next five years is not clear.

Clearly, the growth of fast broadband infrastructure is a good thing. For some years now the UK has been significantly behind other European countries in the delivery of capacity in this area, putting the country at an increasing competitive disadvantage. Whether allowing local pressure groups and Local Authorities to set the spatial priorities for investment is the best way forward is, at very least, open to debate.

It sits very nicely with the “Big Society” ethos, but may have limited economic effects. Comparing the six chosen locations, with one exception, they are all satellites of bigger towns with the employment opportunities that offers. Bar one, Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders, they are all significantly above average on indicators of economic activity,  job level and the level of qualifications in the workforce. Even Innerleithen sees above average economic activity and qualifications.

This is not a measure targeted at improving the economic infrastructure in disadvantaged areas, just mildly inconvenienced ones. It hardly dispels the feeling that “Big Society” actually translates as “Devil take the hindmost.”

Inconvenience retailing

“Unrecognised item in the bagging area” is becoming a key phrase in the shopping vocabulary. Is there any machine more incomprehensible than the self-service check out in a supermarket?

From the perspective of the store they are fast, efficient and, according to Asda, “improve the shopping experience for those on the go”. They are also harbingers of a bright future in which customer facing staff will be superfluous - improving profitability no end.

From the standpoint of the customer they are a logistical disaster area and a constant cause of frustration, embodying, as they do, an astonishing lack of intuition about customer behaviour at the till.

So bad is this that, far from releasing staff from the onerous business of dealing with customers, one supermarket of my acquaintance has a team of supervisors helping customers process their purchases – so much for self service.

Treating the customer as a nuisance (TCAN) is a stratagem with a long history in British retailing. The reason Basil strikes our collective funny bone is that we all know a shopkeeper or hotelier that is a little bit Fawlty. Once upon a time it was just another area where the supermarkets were able to overwhelm the small retailer. The Colgate smiles and happy service in Marks & Spencer have moved the shopping experience onto a different planet from the bulldog scowls of the independent High Street. “No food, No drinks, No ice creams” (no customers)

No longer – now TCAN rules. For years some supermarkets, irritated at people only buying the same things week in week out, have moved staples around the store at regular intervals to keep customers guessing as to their location. Now the irritation has moved into the bagging area.  The enormous convenience of having someone to bag up your goods has long since been abandoned on grounds of cost. Now the very existence of a manned till is at risk for the same reason.

The holy grail of the supermarket is for customers to shop for goods and leave the premises having had their value charged automatically to a credit card. Once suppliers get their act together with RFiD chips, this will become a reality, in the meantime however we are stuck with the inconvenience of scanning the barcode on every item.

TCAN dictates that this is the customers problem – hence the self service check out. Research by retail banking consultancy RBR estimates that some 15,000 of the brutes will be in operation in UK stores by 2011, up from 7,000 in 2008. Already twenty five percent of sales in Tesco use the technology.

There is, however, some anecdotal evidence of a fightback. Cowes, famous for yachting rather than shopping, has two supermarkets – a small Sainsburys that replaced Somerfield this summer and a slightly larger Co-op about 200 yards apart.  The Sainsburys has five self-service checkouts and two manned tills.  The Co-op has five manned tills and no self service checkout.

The Sainsburys store can be distinguished by a long queue of increasingly disgruntled customers at the manned checkout. Behind the till a surly apparatchik exhorts the customers to use the self service machines which, for the most part, stand empty. The Co-op, by contrast, sees a regular throng of happy shoppers in conversation with staff who are universally friendly and welcoming.

A straw poll on Cowes High Street found that shoppers, initially enthused by the replacement of Somerfield with Sainsburys, clearly prefer the Co-op and everyone questioned mentioned the self-service checkouts as a reason for not shopping in Sainsburys.

It has been a long time since anyone described the Co-op as a paradigm for the way forward in supermarket retailing but, in Cowes at least, it meets expectations very well indeed.

I am no technophobe. I understand why supermarkets want to streamline the payment process but universal adoption of RFid technology is the answer not this clunky intermediate technology that puts potential customers off.  "Aha!" I hear the geeks saying. "There was a time when people used to go into banks and queue up to get cash." We now have the ubiquitous provision of ATMs, yet there are still queues of people taking out and paying in cash at banks.

It could be argued that the roots of the current financial crisis can be found in the breaking of the link between the personal bank managers and their customers and its attempted replacement with a machine. Nowadays, if you want truly appalling customer service, go to a bank.

Supermarkets are not yet that bad but in many cases the implementation of self-checkout has been as crass as the technology is poor.  Rather than attempt to force reluctant customers to use the machines by restricting the manning of tills, Waitrose adopt a different method. Here, upon entering the store, you are invited to take a scanner with you on your journey around the store and scan each item as you place it in your trolley. Those who want to take advantage of self-checkout are able to do so while tills and top flight customer service remain the same for those that don’t.

TCAN is a slippery slope. The retail banks have shown what can happen when it becomes embedded in strategy. Hopefully supermarkets will take note of what is happening in Cowes and on High Streets across the country as customers vote with their feet.