January 18, 2020

HS2 impact, data consent clash, bush fires and more: best of the week’s news

By admin In News, Technology No comments

Tim Fryer, technology editor

HS2 project will devastate ‘huge swathes’ of natural habitat

I’ll be honest, my comments this week are about neither technology nor HS2. They concern the use of exaggeration and cliché that seems to be taken for granted these days. I say “these days”, but it has probably forever been thus. I suspect I am still smarting slightly from a general election where our delightful right-wing media added “hard left” or “Marxist” to every reference to the Labour party, sending all of Middle England (and every other geographical or notional part of the UK) running to the hills – we can’t have a bunch of Arthur Scargills running the country again! They could have just said “useless”, “ineffectual” or perhaps “slightly delusional” and been more honest and even-handed.

And so we come to HS2, which will “devastate huge swathes”. Things will be lost irreparably and other bits will be destroyed: “The figures are grim and the reality worse”.

I don’t doubt that large areas will be affected, but the emotive language that dresses it up does the argument no favours. To me, it just amplifies the impression that there is someone with an agenda who will say whatever they see fit to get their argument across. An impression that is underlined by the comment about HS2 destroying carbon-capturing land: one premise of using trains is that they take more carbon-producing vehicles off the road and HS2 will be electrified. There is a more constructive dialogue to be had by pinning HS2 down to very specific environmental goals that would include wildlife corridors and protected areas.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much the environmentalist and the case for HS2 is not complete at the very least until they know how much it will cost, but I wish people would moderate their language so that it fell within the likely boundaries of accuracy as a minimum.

Again, I point the finger of blame at the politicians who believe they can say whatever they want without fear of consequences. If our country (and many other countries) are led with such a lack of scruples, it becomes open season for the rest of us.

This last week has been a belter. It is astonishing how many people have passionate and informed opinions about Harry and Meghan and how the relatively newlyweds have treated the Queen, although it would be interesting to know how many of them had actually spoken to Harry, Meghan or HRH to garner a genuinely accurate view. There is a suspicion that all the protagonists actually still like and love each other.

Yet based on hearsay and conjecture alone, the likes of Piers Morgan feel sufficiently empowered to share such anger and vitriol on the subject without a second thought to what he may be doing to either those individuals or the public perceptions of them.

My point is that language is important and the more carelessly we use it, the more extreme we have to become to get a point across. If this downward spiral continues, it will not be a surprise if soon nobody believes anything that they see or hear.

Ben Heubl, associate editor

Dating and fertility apps siphon data to advertisers

Our report on a study carried out by the non-profit Norwegian Consumer Council confirmed that companies cannot rely on users reading its terms and conditions. Take the simple example of location data. With its Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), the ICO is very clear on what it wants companies to do and not to do. It urges companies to only collect if “the data is anonymous” or that the company has “the user’s consent to use it for a value-added service”.

What are ‘value-added services’? Strictly speaking, these are services requiring the processing of location data beyond what is necessary for the transmission of a communication or the billing in respect of that communication. ICO mentions the example of a mobile network operator using its customers’ location to target location-specific content.

Now to the more tricky part: giving consent. According to ICO’s definition, consent “must be freely given, specific and informed” and “involve some form of clear positive action” – users ticking a box, clicking a link, sending an email and similar actions. “The person must fully understand they are giving the company consent to use their location data.”

The problem? Companies accommodate for that, but without caring about what “fully understands” really means. When I sign up, I mostly don’t read the terms and lack a full understanding of what data is being taken from me and what they do with it. Ok, my bad, but don’t you feel the same many times when you sign up to a service?

The ICO is clear on the subject that companies can’t show consent by merely providing information about the use of location data as part of a privacy policy. ICO concedes that privacy policies are often “hard to find, difficult to understand, or rarely read”. In the past, games such as Angry Birds were found to be particularly bad in even providing a sensible privacy policy.

ICO demands that users understand “the types of location data [the company] will be processing”; “what [the company] is using it for”; “how long you will keep it”, and “whether it will be passed to a third party to provide the value-added service”. After signing up to an app, do you walk away with feeling truly aware of these things? I find it hard to believe.

The location data tracking market is booming. E&T is in the process of conducting an in-depth investigation into how this market works, where location data is being traded and between whom, who are the small and large incumbent players in the UK market and what all this leaves us, the users, with. If you work in the location data-tracking market, we want you to reach out to share information and data with us. You can contact me at benheubl@theiet.org.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

View from Brussels: Enough climate cash to avoid a climate crash?

Farmers to be rewarded for protecting wildlife and tackling climate change

In a post-Brexit UK, our regular View from Brussels column could in future editions become either a sobering reality check on what the UK is now missing out on or a quaint reminder of how economic and political life used to be in the old days before we trashed longstanding relationships with all our EU friends and neighbours. It may possibly become both. Whether the old days will be remembered as the good old days or not remains to be seen, depending on what the new Tory government decides to do with this country’s hard-won, bloody independence and the policies it chooses to implement and prioritise.

First up is the new Agriculture Bill, with a promise to farmers that they’ll still get the same amount of financial support from the UK government as they were already getting from the EU before Brexit was deemed necessary, at least for the next five years. After that? TBC. As with much about life in the UK, post-Brexit: TBC.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

Australian bush fire smoke has spread around the Earth, Nasa satellite shows

Well, this isn’t good. Not good at all.

One of Nasa’s satellites has been tracking the Aussie bush fires and the amount of bad stuff coming from them is shrouding major cities and is moving to China, Mongolia and Russia. The Suomi NPP satellite that has been stalking the particulate matter showed the smoke has circumnavigated the Earth and was now coming back to Australia. Suomi carries five instruments that takes climate measurements and help forecast the weather.

Nasa’s satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, can detect actively burning fires, track transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the severity of burn scars.

Air quality has been a major issue in Australia since the bushfires started, with people being urged to stay inside and avoid strenuous exercise. Like in the tennis recently, where players are dropping like flies because they think they’re breathing in bad air.

Nasa data suggests that while not as severe, millions of citizens in countries such Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and parts of China will be negatively affected by the increased amounts of particulate matter in the air.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

E-waste recycling process developed to stop environmental contamination

E-waste piling up in South-east Asia, UN report finds

Electronic waste is a growing problem and the solution needs to come from engineering as well as government policy. This week, we had good and bad news on e-waste from South East Asia. The bad news is that e-waste is piling up there and the mountains of discarded computers, phones and other gadgets have never been higher. The good news is about researchers developing a new process for dealing with it. What we need a lot more of is designing for repair, disassembly, component re-use and easier recycling.

As we see time and time again in our regular Teardown feature in E&T, evidence of these kind of environmentally minded design techniques is still lacking in new electronics. We also need to stop exporting our rubbish. A country should be able to dispose of its own waste and process its own recycling. Householders can carefully recycle their old computers or plastics into the right bins or the right bags, but once collected, processed and shipped, it’s out of sight and out of mind. I am sure domestic recyclers audit their overseas contractors responsibly and so on, but once out of the country, it’s out of our legal jurisdiction. That’s how our computers end up in toxic tips in Africa or our plastics end up in the seas of Asia. We should take responsibility for our own rubbish.

Siobhan Doyle, assistant features editor

HS2 project will devastate ‘huge swathes’ of natural habitat

According to a new report by the Wildlife Trust, the long-anticipated HS2 high-speed rail project will destroy and divide hundreds of wildlife and nature reserves and the Government should “stop and rethink” it.

The HS2 project is estimated to cost approximately £88bn and will provide a link between London and northern England. However, the Trust says in its report that this billion-pound project will destroy or irreparably damage five internationally protected wildlife sites; 693 local wildlife sites; 108 ancient woodlands, and 33 legally protected sites of special scientific interest. Even species such as cute barn owls may be affected by this, as well as the potential for the dingy skipper butterfly to go locally extinct.

Surely with the amount of money being invested in this ambitious project, it’s only fair for the company building it to properly consider the environmental impact it will have across the country? If you look at the devastation that is happening in Australia, with wildfires killing billions of its own animals, surely something that is relatively large and man-made could have a similar impact? Perhaps not to the extent of the wildfires down under, but I think you get where I’m trying to go with this (I think).

That being said, HS2 Ltd, the company planning to build the line, promptly responded to the Wildlife Trust report, with a spokesperson saying: “The number of sites presented in this report as being ‘at risk of loss, or significant impact’ simply isn’t accurate,” adding that HS2 takes the environmental cost of construction “very seriously.”

The firm offered a solution to the problem regarding woodlands and wildlife areas, stating that it will deliver an unprecedented programme of tree planting and habitat creation alongside the new railway – with seven million new trees and shrubs set to be planted between London and Birmingham alone. “New native woodlands will be planted to link up ancient woodland and tailored mitigation plans in place for protected species,” the unnamed spokesperson added.

Regardless of what environmental factors companies who deliver these large-scale projects take into consideration, wildlife will always be affected in some form or another. I personally think the firm, the Government and organisations such as the Wildlife Trust should come together to think this project through more thoroughly – taking advice and recommendations from the trusts to ensure these projects don’t devastate nature that is already present.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

View from Vitalia: From Siberia to Luxembourg by tarantass and train

After my latest blog post went live several days ago, I received a British reader’s enquiry about the series of the American WPA Guides which I listed as history’s most iconic guidebooks, alongside Baedekers, Murrays and such like.

The reader’s interest was understandable, for, unfortunately, those truly superb guidebooks are not too well-known outside the USA. Ask any UK or European bookseller or book collector, however, and they would be likely to jump up with excitement at the very mention of the beautifully written, historically invaluable, technologically savvy (with large sections on technology in each) and extremely collectible (and therefore very rare) WPA Guides, of which I own, I am proud to say, about a dozen.

What are the WPA Guides and what makes them so special? To answer that question, we must first remember what the WPA, or the Works Projects Administration, was about. That unique initiative appeared in the 1930s during the years of recovery from the Great Depression of the 1920s and was directly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policy.

The WPA was started as an agency to give work to otherwise unemployed professionals, including scientists and engineers. It consisted of several so-called ‘Projects’, one of which, officially known as ‘Project Number One’ focused on involving in public works all kinds of humanitarians: artists, writers, composers, actors etc. That was how the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was born.

The FWP’s main task was to produce guidebooks to every single state in the USA (of which there were then 48), plus Puerto Rico and Alaska (which were not full-scale states as yet) – 50 books in total. On top of those, the FWP released several hundred other books and pamphlets, including guides to America’s major cities (as opposed to the states), interstate roadways, railways, cultural institutions and so on.

The guides – richly illustrated with maps, drawing and photos – were supposed to carry detailed histories of the states in general, plus descriptions of every single settlement within them, from major cities to small hamlets.

One condition was that all the artists, writers and photographers involved remained anonymous, so now we can only guess who was behind such truly unputdownable WPA Guides (often reprinted in the USA these days) as the ones to New York, Texas, Florida and New Orleans, the original editions of which are very expensive (we are talking hundreds of dollars here) and extremely hard to find.

There are unconfirmed rumours among book collectors that literary greats like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald took part in compiling the WPA Guides and that could well be the case, judging by the supreme quality of the writing. No matter who those anonymous writers, artists and photographers were, they have indeed managed to produce some of history’s most-loved and respected guidebooks, destined to outlive themselves and the epoch they sought to portray.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

HS2 project will devastate ‘huge swathes’ of natural habitat

Forestry Commission launches virtual forest tours for schoolchildren

A couple of stories this week almost write their own dystopian science-fiction story. The Wildlife Trust has made its own pessimistic contribution to a plethora of predictions about the up and downsides of the HS2 rail project, with a report warning that construction will destroy swathes of nature sites and conservation areas. The Trust believes HS2 claims that habitats will be relocated or replaced to achieve a net zero impact on countryside are “unachievable”.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Forestry England has released a virtual reality app that allows teachers to lead their classes through simulated woodland without the hassle of carrying out a risk assessment. Primary school children will be able to find out what’s involved in the commercial side of forestry while sitting at their desk, thanks to their smartphone and a VR headset. Fast forward a generation or two and you can imagine all field trips being like this. I can’t think of it off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s at least one sci-fi tale that involves virtual trips to all kinds of location being a central part of the curriculum.

Seriously, though, the Wildlife Trust’s argument – emotionally striking as it is – will take a back seat in considerations of whether or not to press ahead with HS2, because it’s so hard to quantify the ‘value’ of the resources it’s trying to defend. Not that there seems to be a huge amount of solid evidence behind the various estimates of how much the rail line will benefit the economy, if it’s ever completed.

I’m not knocking the idea of technology that might replace an actual physical experience with a virtual one. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be the responsible adult in charge of taking a group of ten year olds around a commercial logging site. In fact, the idea that showing kids this age what’s involved in a real-life industry reminds me of how trips ‘through the round window’ as a pre-schooler watching Play School to see what goes on in a biscuit factory, for example, were a genuinely absorbing and informative experience. Let’s just all agree that they need to get out into the real countryside now and again and even take a few risks while it’s still there to enjoy.

Tim Fryer, technology editor

HS2 project will devastate ‘huge swathes’ of natural habitat

And so we come to HS2, which will “devastate huge swathes”. Things will be lost irreparably and other bits will be destroyed: “The figures are grim and the reality worse”.