Smart, very smart: how to navigate a city, avoiding tourists: stay away from the red zones (photos taken by tourists), consider the blue zones (photos taken by locals) or yellow (could be either). Click the photo to see an enlarged version; click here to be taken to a gallery for other cities.
Here is the letter I sent Facebook to ask for my data (for the background to this story, see this post)
TO: Data Controller / Legal Compliance
Facebook Ireland Ltd
Hanover Reach
5-7 Hanover Quay
Dublin 2
IRELAND
RE: Subject Access Request (Data Protection Acts)
Dear Facebook (Ireland),
I wish to make a subject access request under s4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 (Ireland), the Data Protection Act 1998 (UK) and all other applicable legislation reflecting the rights I am conferred as an EU citizen under EU Directive 95/46/EC.
If you are not the designated Data Controller for Facebook, please pass this to the appropriate person, bearing in mind the legal deadline. I am expecting the company’s full and frank compliance with applicable Irish and EU law and thus expect to be given this data within the stipulated 21 days. Facebook was first given notice of this request in writing (via several channels on your online communication system on the Facebook website) on 10th May 2010.
As my (EU-based) contracting party, I am by law entitled to receive a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form, and any information about me passed outside the EU.
I would like a full and frank disclosure of all information held. Please inform me of all information you are legally bound to withhold. Please note that I will not be satisfied by any attempted exemption of information allowing the identification of third parties where those parties are known to me (i.e. form part of the same Facebook ‘Networks’ as me).
I prefer to be sent this information digitally wherever possible, in as full a depth and breadth as possible, and additionally in such structured formats as it is accessed, processed and/or communicated by your company.
I understand that you might like me to prove my identity, so a copy of my UK passport is attached. That is to be the sole lawful purpose for that document’s use. I understand that my rights also extend to demanding the removal of information about me when it is not held for the lawful and clearly stated purpose, and thus am giving advance notice of my exercise of that right: please release and delete that document once it is no longer required to prove my identity.
Yours faithfully,
Philippe Bradley
Also included was a photocopy of my passport and my contact details, plus a link to my facebook profile.
I am on a little quest. A quest to get Facebook to show me what it knows about me. The thing about ‘Web 2.0’ businesses (how old hat that sounds now) is that their entire business models are focused on understanding you, profiling you, getting as much information about you from many relevant sources:
But what constitutes ‘my information’ for the purposes of a Subject Access Request (SAR) under UK, Irish (indeed, Europe-wide) Data Protection legislation?
A subject access request is an order any person in the EU can send any EU-based business that collects their data. It’s an order along the lines of ‘show me what you got’.
So I sent one. Initially, and with infinitesimally little hope of a reply, through some of the Contact Us webforms on facebook.com – doubtless to join mountains of rubbish in there, despite being clearly marked ‘Legal request: please respond; subject access request under the Data Protection Acts’.
And yet I knew that an earlier brave soul had managed to use a different part of the Data Protection Act to get Facebook to properly delete his account (Facebook prefers you to ‘deactivate’ accounts so you don’t leave an information black hole in the picture they’ve built up of everyone around you.
This told me two things. One, that for some reason Facebook thought it was under DPA jurisdiction. Two, it considers your social graph to be very important data – data about you, but with wider implications than that. So it was worth pushing on.
Thanks to a good spot by eagle-eyed lawyer Andrew Sharpe (@TMT_lawyer on Twitter if you want to follow his developing thoughts on the implications of his find; and here’s me), the secret is out: unless you’re accessing Facebook from the USA, in which case you’re contracting with a business in California, under Californian law, if you’re dialling in from anywhere else you’re dealing with a business in… Ireland!
All hands to the typewriter, I boshed out a pitiful attempt at a serious sounding Subject Access Request Letter (which I will post later)(Edit: HERE) and dispatched it, airmail to be signed for on delivery, with haste.
I suppose technically Facebook’s 40 days for compliance started when I sent them my first SAR (through their website forms). That was 16 days ago. Whether I want to argue that or not probably depends how nasty I’m feeling 24 days from now. Facebook’s been under the privacy kosh recently and maybe they deserve the extra 16 days if we mutually were to consider my posted letter to be the first SAR.
Let’s see what happens now. I would love suggestions in the comments concerning what data I should insist upon receiving, and in what format.
I will also be posting a rough guide to use of European data protection legislation in the coming weeks. In the meantime, wherever you are, you can have a look at the EU pages on the subject.
"Why do you live in a commune? Please explain…"
So asks a friend. I’ve moved. But not to a commune! To a co-op. This post aims to start explaining what it is and why living here is so desireable.
This is an especially good time to set out the basic principles, given Gordon Brown’s statement earlier this week that Ed Miliband will work with the Co-operative party to draft Labour’s forthcoming election manifesto. Gordon Brown, it is worth remembering, is the first British Prime Minister to be a member of the Co-operative Party, alongside his main party affiliation (New Labour).
This post will focus on the general legal principles behind cooperative housing, especially the one I now live in. I hope to discuss other aspects in later posts, if there’s any interest. My overarching aim is to spread some appreciation for the concept (both from self interest and in the hope that maybe readers or their acquaintances might consider helping co-ops to be set up or develop by getting involved in their financing, making gifts or provisions in their wills.
I’m a tenant, with similar basic rights and obligations as any other poor bastard grinding away in this big city, paying rent to a landlord. But in a co-op housing association, there’s a difference – my landlord is virtual; a legal fiction, a juristic ghoul created by the founders of the co-op when it was built 35 years ago, courtesy of a big change in the law in 1965.
When you sign the tenancy agreement, a token £1 payment gets you a share in the co-op society, making you a full member. Through voting and volunteering, the members of the co-op animate this ghoulish puppet. Dear landlord – we would like to hedge against rises in gas prices and slash our CO2 output by installing woodchip-fuelled heating systems. And the landlord makes it so. Dear landlord – we would like you to please set aside some of our rent (about £51 a week – £40 for basic rent, the rest is bills, tax, insurance and service charge) to fill a room with paint, tools, flooring, lightbulbs any other consumables we need for our houses. Make it so! Dear landlord – we would like a totally noninterventionist, liberal policy concerning how we arrange the house, paint walls, put up fixings, etc. So.
The landlord is us; we hire CDS (itself a cooperative) to handle the bureaucracy. We own the land (on long lease from the council) and can do largely as we please with it. So when one resident – a designer with the very illustrious Heatherwick Studio – came up with a plan to build a huge storage cage for bikes built with Russian railway sleepers – the co-op agreed and members got together to get it built, with the money, as always, coming from our rent.
There are ~120 of us living here, in houses and apartments. We live a 20 minute cycle from Waterloo, five minutes from a Jubilee Line station, and just around the corner from Goldsmiths Art College. It’s insane how far rent can stretch, even this close to central London, when nobody’s trying to make a profit.
———- Legal detail
The governing statute for the co-op is the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965. Under it and the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000, the co-op is registered with the FSA (Financial Services Authority). As with most co-ops, companies (often co-ops themselves) provide co-op housing societies with management services and registration, doing the basic bureaucracy and letting the ‘hippies’ get on with actually calling the shots concerning the property.
Share structure:
Like public companies, a co-op has share capital. There are diverse ways of organising this, but where I live the share structure is par value, fully mutual: each member gets 1 share; each share costs £1; and on moving out, you get your £1 back – you can’t take it with you or sell it for more even if the property has gone up in value. Your share gives you a single vote on the rare occasions where everybody gets together to vote on something. Liability when things go wrong is usually limited to that £1. The property remains in the ownership of current occupants (members) – but any profit cannot go to them; it must, by its regulations (and probably by law*), be spent on improving the co-op. If one day the land is sold at a profit, that profit has to stay within the co-op or find another co-op (cy-pres principle) – the same with any excess from the rent. This is a form of land ownership that’s very different to most in the country – it is not owned in the hope of making a buck at the end (what this means for the mortgage provider, I’m not sure yet).
Tax:
The land is private property; my council tax is paid from my weekly £51 rent (council tax is £2.58/week at present). The co-op, if fully mutual, is normally exempt from Capital Gains Tax and Corporation Tax*; co-ops can also often classify as charities and get the vast tax benefits associated with that, too. I don’t know for sure whether my co-op is a registered society but I am going to infer it isn’t: charitable housing associations must give their members security of tenure, whereas my contract stipulates that I can be kicked out with a month’s notice (that’s also my notice period), which makes getting mortgages much easier (the lender is sure it can take exclusive repossession of the vacant property if the co-op were to default.
Tenancy:
A co-op, being run for its inhabitant’s benefit, is not an Assured Shorthold Tenancy; it is a contractual tenancy, which ends when membership is resigned or withdrawn. Things sometimes go wrong. The wrong sort of person is let in. A fully mutual status, with properly defined rules, allows the co-op to act to end a tenancy and withdraw someone’s membership; a sad but crucial control mechanism.
Financing the purchase
I’m fresh here and have little idea how the co-op was first set up, the lease acquired, or the houses built (surprisingly nice for 60s housing!). So this section is subject to the proviso that I’m talking about co-ops in general, which may or may not apply to where I live.
Primary funding for establishment will come from mortgaging the property, to the Housing Corporation and/or the bank (from my contract it seems both mortgages were entered into at the start – I have no idea what’s been paid off to date). Secondary funding is then from the members, from charities, the government. Some state funding was provided in the early 70s under Reg Freeson. Fresson was a member of the Co-operative Party and Housing Minister under the then Labour government – I suspect some of that went into this community; the timing fits. This co-op does not take council money as the council then demands the right to nominate people (e.g. the homeless) into membership – people that usually just want to get housed and don’t lift a finger for the co-op.
Most interestingly, co-ops can issue loan notes (properly called loan stock) to finance their activities. An investor will receive a fixed rate of interest back over the repayment term.
Those are the basics; I thought I’d start with the legal nitty gritty, having just come from a land law class on (of all things) leases!