From Man with Love. A conversation with Dr Alexandra Delaney-Bhattacharya

Welcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Paul Breitbarth, Dr. K Royal, and Ralph O'Brien meet with Dr. Alexandra Delaney-Bhattacharya, Information Commissioner for the Isle of Man to discuss her experiences, professional growth, priorities, and outlook. It's a rousing good discussion and one listeners everywhere should love.

If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us!

From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

Transcript

Paul 0:00

How do you go from a bachelor in South Asia Studies, a Master in Poverty and International Development, and a doctoral thesis on Bollywood to a career in privacy and freedom of information? Our guest today has exactly done that. Dr. Alexandra Delaney Battacheria is the information commissioner for the Isle of Man. Just like Jersey and Guernsey, it's one of those islands with a special status and their own data protection regime. Alex was appointed in September 2024, and we look forward to hear from her what those first 18 months were like, and of course what's coming next. My name is Pal Breitbart. My name is Ralph O'Brien.

K 0:37

I'm Kay Royal and welcome to Serious Privacy. Alex, we are so thrilled to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Do you like being called Alex? Or Alex is absolutely fun. I only get Alexandra from my mother when I've done something bad, which is actually more common than it should be. Beautiful.

K 0:54

So what we do here is the unexpected question, and it's truly unexpected. I have raised the bar this year, and if my co-hosts don't fall over laughing, then I have failed. Y'all ready for today's?

Paul 1:07

Nope.

K 1:08

If you were to fall asleep face first into a soup, which soup do you want it to be?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Ooh, what a question. You know what? I'm gonna be a little bit romantic here. So I don't I you don't normally associate with soup with romance, do you? But during my wedding, I celebrated my eighth wedding anniversary recently. My husband and I had a really small budget, right? And he went all out with the food. He's from Bengal, he's Bengali, so the goat curry was a big thing for him. And my sort of very small piece of that was I wanted a vegetarian French onion soup, which is so difficult to get. And so I had one specially made, and that was perfect. So if I could fall asleep after a few glasses of champagne on my wedding day into my vegetarian, specially made French onion soup, I would be there in a heartbeat.

K 1:57

Awesome. We can't really get a better answer than that, but we're gonna we're gonna do other answers. Ralph, Paul, what you got?

Ralph 2:05

Let's go back to the series privacy cookbook yet again. Yeah. I'm very old-fashioned, good old-fashioned cream of tomato with lots of black pepper. But actually I'd probably choose not to fall asleep at all because potential drowning.

Paul 2:18

That's not the purpose of this question, Ralph.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

Quit taking the fun away. Stop it, stop it, stab it.

Paul 2:24

So I would make a distinction between summer and winter if that's allowed. In summer I would fall asleep in a gaspacho. Lots of garlic, cucumber, tomatoes, maybe some paprika. Just nice and fresh. And in winter it would be Dutch beef soup, which is really thick, so you can stand a spoon upright in it. Ooh. Very hearthy, very warming. So there you go.

K 2:51

Nice. I have to be careful because I'm allergic to gluten. So if I fell asleep in a soup with gluten, I shouldn't have had it in front of me to begin with. So that limits my options. And I can't decide between a minestroni or butternut squash. I'm gonna go minestroni, because I think I could clean that up easier.

Ralph 3:12

Sounds good.

K 3:14

Yeah, it might splash more, but I think I could clean it easier.

Ralph 3:18

Nobody will actually eat my Christmas soup, which I make just after Christmas, which is basically everything left over in a blender.

unknown 3:24

Right.

Ralph 3:27

Who cares? Talking of everything in a blender, yes.

K 3:31

Are you gonna make this a segue? Go for it.

Ralph 3:34

This is a segue back to Dr. Alex. Dr. Alex, we normally let people uh just take a moment to describe how they got here. And as Paul said in the intro, you've had a really interesting path. Please, Dr. Alex, how did we get to here?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

How did we get to here? What a question. Like many little girls, I never really envisaged a career as an information commissioner. Being really honest, I always wanted to be a vet or a scientist or something really exciting or an Egyptologist. But I'm dreadful with numbers. I'm dreadful at science. I wanted to be a romance writer for a long time. That's probably still my secret sort of career aspirations, the next Julie Cooper, perhaps. Who knows?

Paul 4:12

Real romance or more smut?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

I'll leave that. I'll leave that to the audience. You can imagine. So I was before university, I went and did a gap year. And I'm from a very working class family. So I saved up an awful lot of money myself to go on this gap year to go and teach English in Nepal. And while I was on my gap year, I knew after my gap year, I knew that I wanted to do something working with people. I knew I wanted to help people. And I had this very sort of lofty ambition or aspiration to go into the law and be a barrister. But I was the first girl in my family really to go to university and I didn't really have role models around me. So I didn't really know what that looked like, right? What was that for me? And I was going to go and do classics at Manchester University. And then, but then before that, I went off on this gap year. And that really, at 18, it was a bit of a love, eat prey-love moment. It opened my eyes to different cultures, different ways of living. And I think during those six months I spent in Nepal in the Kathmandu Valley were the happiest of my entire life. They completely changed the course of everything that I wanted to do. So I came back from Nepal very, very aspirational with very rose-tinted glasses. And I knew that whatever it took, I wanted to be back there. I wanted to live there. I wanted to work there. I wanted to be settled there. And so I looked through, I had a place at Manchester University to do classics, and I thought I don't want to do classics anymore. What can I study that is going to get me back to Nepal the quickest? Looked at international development, looked at economics, looked at all of those kinds of courses, and looked through the clearing route as well, because that was the only way I would be able to change course at that point. The only course that had any availability was religions and theology, South Asian studies. And I thought, why not? You know what? I did, I did philosophy of religion A level. Why not? Why not? So I did that course and it was very interesting. I did, I studied Sanskrit, I studied Urdu, I studied Indian philosophy, gender in Hinduism, and it was fascinating. And then I knew then that I wanted to specialise further. So I looked at a master's degree, nearly bankrupted myself doing a master's degree. And those were the days of unpaid, yeah, those were the days of unpaid internships, and I did must have done about 10 of those. So I studied for a master's in international development and poverty at the University of Manchester and focused really on social policy and my master's thesis or master's dissertation was marriage timing and caste in the Kathmandu Valley, the place where I lived with the community I'd lived with. And then I thought I want to go and actually get some practical experience in the international development sector. So I worked in international development for a few years. I was doing internships, some paid, some unpaid, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Nepal. And then realized that I fell out of love a little bit with international development. And then I went to the dark side of management consulting, which people tend to do the opposite. People tend to go into management consulting and then have an epiphany and think, I'm going to go and do something for society and for the for the good, the great and the good. And I went the other way. I thought, I'm going to, I need some money now. I've lived like a student for too long. I want to earn some good money. So I started working in management consultancy. And I was doing that for a couple of years. And I thought, this really isn't fulfilling me in the way that I wanted, the way that international development did, because it was for a greater good, it was for a purpose. So I looked at going back to study. I looked at going to do an MBA. And at the time I thought, I'm not, this isn't the right move for me. So I thought if I was going to do a PhD in anything, what would it be? And I'd at that point, obviously, I'd lived in Nepal, I'd lived in Sri Lanka, I'd lived in India, and I'd been on the receiving end of both positive and negative negative discrimination based on the fact I was a white woman, a white Western, white Western woman living and working within those very different cultural contexts. So I thought if I can parlay that into a PhD research and my love of Indian film and combine the two, what a research topic. And fortuitously, I went on the University of Manchester's website because I was looking for recommendations for supervisors. I found a Bollywood expert, Professor Rajinda Dudra, at Manchester. I wrote to him and the rest is history. I know that's another podcast, but the rest is history. It took me, so I was studying, I was working in management consultancy and I was starting doing my research. And again, I was self-funded. It was very much a passion project. And partway a couple of years into this, I thought I really need an easier job. This management consultancy and studying at this level is exhausting and I'm going to burn myself out. And I thought I really need an easy job at this point. And that's where the ICO came into it. That was supposed to be my easy job. Regulation was supposed to be a break while I finished my thesis.

Ralph 8:50

Yeah, you may have missed my one there.

K 8:53

Oh, I love that. Believe it or not, I started my PhD because I needed a break from a difficult job.

SPEAKER_03 9:00

Wow.

K 9:01

I was in the office 10 and 12 hours a day. I wasn't getting out until 9 o'clock at night. And I said, you know what? If I commit to a PhD, which mine is in public policy, oh, interesting. If I was going to get one, it would commit me to leaving the office at least two days a week in time to get to class. Now, the bad thing is being in privacy, you do your shoe years of coursework and test, and then you do part-time, and then you do your dissertation. It took me forever to do the dissertation because they wouldn't approve my topic, which is privacy. Wow. I'm like, I I y'all knew I've been writing papers on this for two years. Your courses are supposed to prepare you with all your research materials to research. All of my papers were always on privacy. I don't know why it surprised them. So how did you finally IVO then, Alex?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

How did I find what a question? So I it was I joined, I still feel like a newbie to privacy and data protection. And I think I am when I can I consider some of my peers that have been in this field for a lot longer than I have. I so I was looking for, as I said, I was looking for an easier job. And I thought the civil service, that's got a reputation for being a bit easy in the UK. No, it hasn't. My my mum's an ex-civil servant. So I thought I need just to knock a gear off and relax a bit. And um, and at the time, there was this term floating around, this ethereal, mysterious term floating around the management consultancy world called the GDPR. And I was like, what is the GDPR? And at the time, a lot of consultancies were thinking, seeing dollar signs or pound sign and getting very excited about, oh, we can sell some more product, we can do records management, we can sell GDPR transformation programs. And I was on the periphery of one such project and thought, oh, that's interesting. What's a regulator? Oh, that's interesting. Found the UK ICO's website, having a bit of a nose one afternoon on what it was. And really fortuitously, there was a job that was listed international policy lead, I think it was called. And I thought, that looks fun. I went down the rabbit hole and I applied and I didn't get the job. I had the interview. I was interviewed and I didn't get it. And I was really sad about it. They were interviewing for a few different policy roles at that time. Didn't get it. And then I was actually more disappointed than I thought I would be. And then they phoned me a couple of weeks later and said, actually, we liked you. We think you're on our reserve list. There's another role in international that's come up. So at the time, it was this really interesting time. It was the end of 2017, pre-2018, pre-inter implementation of the law. And lots of really established members of the UK ICO were going off to be very well-paid DPOs. So they had this sort of exodus of brilliant talent. And I think I just got lucky. I think I was just in the right place at the right time. So I had this very strong work ethic, even though I was going in to relax a bit essentially and have a good time while I finished my studies. And I worked really hard, I was really diligent, I had a very strong project management background. And these were all skills that the ICO really valued at that time and really wanted. So I did really well and I got noticed fairly early on by former Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, her head of private office, John Kavanagh. And over the years was able to work very closely with a lot of very senior members of staff. And I treated all of that as a bit of an anthropological experiment, I think, in terms of working with senior leadership, because I come from that development gender, cultural studies sort of background. So I was constantly observing and learning and actually got really interested and really passionate about privacy as a concept, data protection as a concept as well. And I just found it interesting. And as I came to the end of my PhD, which dragged on far longer than it should have done, because I got so engrossed in the work and was chasing promotion and left as a head of department. So how many grades up? About three or three, three grades up from when I joined, I think. I was planning to go into either academia or a research position or something in the gender South Asia, very poorly defined in my brain space, or retrained as a psychotherapist at that point, because that was the other wonderful idea I had, specializing in interracial relationships and intercultural relationship. I thought, actually, I don't know if I want to do that. I still think privacy, public policy, data protection is so interesting. And there was so much happening from when I joined in those very early days of the Camp Cambridge Analytica scandal to so many big scandals and so many big breaches occurring. And it's such a cool place to be, right? It's really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

And I got the plug. It was, it really was. And so even though I never really set out for a career, I feel so lucky. I was I had a quarterly meeting with the chief executive of the Isle of Man government on Monday, and he said, Are you still enjoying it? Kind of, please say you're still enjoying it. And I was like, best job I've ever had. I absolutely love it. And you know, I feel really fortunate to have landed where I did, but I'm also hyper-aware that I am still comparatively a newbie and a baby in the privacy world at the grand old age of 40.

Ralph 13:56

Actually, uh it's just occurred to me, and please don't take this as any way or slight, that we've got a lot of international listeners who might not even be too sure what the Isle of Man even is.

Paul 14:07

Or where it is.

unknown 14:09

Yeah.

Ralph 14:10

Or why it is. Yeah, but perhaps it might be useful just to quickly just outline what the Isle of Man is and what the Commissioner's role in it and how it differs from the rest of or what the unique challenges are there, of course.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yeah, absolutely. So the Isle of Man is it's located in the Irish Sea between the UK and and Ireland, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. It's a very cold, very windy, but very beautiful place. We're very small, so we're one of three Crown dependencies. The other Crown dependencies are Jersey and Guernsey, and they're in the Channel Islands between the UK and France. So the Isle of Man is up separate from that. We are different in the sense that we are a Crown dependency. So we have our own, our own parliament, our own legislative framework here, our own, we're essentially independent from fully independent from the UK as a jurisdiction. We rely on the UK for our defence and for our diplomacy, but for everything else, we are completely independent. So for data protection terms, that's really interesting. We have our own legislation here that is modelled on the GDPR because we have adequacy status with the EU and also with the UK as well now. But we are, yes, we have our own, we have our own laws, we have our own regulators to regulate those laws. So we essentially do everything that the UK ICO does and needs to do, but on a very small scale, which is fascinating.

Paul 15:32

How small is small?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

How small is small? It's what we've got a population of around 85,000 people, and I'm probably gonna get this wrong, but I feel from north to south point of the island it's about 30 miles, and maybe from east to west or west to east, it's about 13 miles. Wow. So not as small as Gibraltar. I don't think we're quite as small as Bermuda, but we are a small island. Oh, are you? So we're bigger than Jersey then, but smaller population.

Paul 16:05

And when when and talking about your team, because that's also fairly small, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah, gosh. So I, as I said, I went from one of the world's biggest data protection regulators in the UK. And again, I was quite fortunate to see their growth from quite a small folksy regulator underneath, and Liz Denham just took it from strength to strength in her tenure to I think they've got over a thousand now. I came in here, and there's a team of there was a team of four, including myself. And it was I just remember being a bit shell-shocked in my first week. I was sitting in my office, we had the lady that's responsible for registrations, we had casework, we had my assistant commissioner, we had breeches, and I was across absolutely everything, and I still am across absolutely everything. But I think at the time we were probably the world's smallest data protection regulator or one of them. I'm really proud though, in in the in my first year, I doubled the size of the team to a size, so a team of 10, bringing in much, much needed new capacity and capabilities and outreach and international, in comms, in project management and operations. And I've tried to treat it as a business transformation exercise. There are lots of areas that need to be modernized as an office. I think it's fair to say that when the GDPR was introduced and the fee regimes in the UK and the other Channel and the Channel Islands were introduced in terms of that risk-based fee model, we didn't have that. So organizations here were paying this flat rate of essentially £50 a year, regardless of whether you're a huge bank or a small controller. So we we didn't have the same level of investment. And I was trying I've tried to essentially supercharge or turbocharge that in a year, which has been very demanding. But we are getting there. So we've still got a way to go in terms of catching up to be able to fulfil or deliver my ambition and my huge aspirations for the office. But I am, I am with working with the team at pace here.

Ralph 18:04

So that means the Isle of Man is funded in a very similar way to the ICO in the UK, where where controllers and processors pay a registration fee, essentially, almost like the tax on processing personal data, for want of a better word, that keeps the regulator independent of government, correct?

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yes, absolutely. And we don't have an FOI grant in the same way that the UK does. It's again, it's the control controllers and processors would pay that registration fee. I also believe, and again, because I'm still very new to this world, I believe that under one of the old legislations, you had to pay by type of processing, which was very complicated. So I'm glad we'll pass that, because that sounded like a special kind of hell in terms of administering that. So we are moving back to back towards risk-based, but we're trying to do it in a cleaner, more efficient way.

Ralph 18:50

That must be fascinating then, because with that sort of limited resource to work out where best to place it for maximum impact, right? Because these days, and certainly looking at the ICO in the UK under the Data Use and Access Act, there's a lot of move to move away from more penalty into sort of promoting innovation. So, what's the position with the Island Man regulator in terms of the placement of things like the carrot and the stick, the enforcement activities, innovation versus individual regulation? That's probably a huge loaded question, but probably one your best place to answer.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. So if we think about my background at the UK ICO, I come from very much the roles that I had international cooperation, legislative reform team. And I was Simon McDougall's private secretary. So he was the one the first um exec director of tech and innovation. And then I was in the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum as that first head of delivery. So I've always sat on the kind of proactive stick carrot side of regulation, which is my sweet spot. I really enjoy engagement, I really enjoy talking to people. That's that is my happy, comfortable place. When I came to the office here, I was suddenly faced or tasked with really getting into the weeds of casework, really getting into the weeds of complaints and taking regulatory action for the first time. So I've I have taken regulatory action, I've issued enforcement notices, I've issued reprimands, and I'm overhauling our pol our approach and our regulatory action policy at the moment. I think for me, when we think about the strategy that I've set out this year, so a couple of weeks ago, we published our strategy for 26-27, which is entitled Collaboration, Compliance Through Collaboration, which really encapsulates my vision of the office. So I always think for me, prevention is better than cure. I think you can achieve more when you work in partnership with people, when you really explain the rationale or the reasons for why you're doing what you're doing. Of course, the state is essential to regulation and good regulation. It's very important as a deterrent. It's incredibly important in providing regulatory certainty and helping organizations know where the what they can expect from a regulator, right? So I I do both, but for me, it was important when I look at the the history of the office to be doing much more in that proactive space, which is where I've tried to invest my resources and my time this year. I'm hoping if we can invest more, then that will reduce the need for the reactive stick approach. Again, that's never going to be a perfect balance. There's always going to be a tension there. I value both sides evenly, but I'm more comfortable, I suppose, if that's the question, in the proactive collaboration space. And I guess in my time here, I've really tried to strengthen those relationships with Jersey and Guernsey and the UK and the MOUs that I've signed and the first world for not world first, of course, but for us, the first for crowd dependencies actually collaborating in some of the activities that Brent Paul and I have been doing. So I'm really fortunate, I think, in the sense that I've got really good neighbours that are just as willing to. Collaborate with each other as I am.

Paul 22:02

Yeah, I agree. That is really important. I also see the strength between the Crown Dependencies of the UK together, and let's not forget Joe Volter as well, who is also playing an important role in in in those discussions. Just looking slightly back, you mentioned the registration fee being fifty pounds. Have you increased those yet? Because I'm looking now at the numbers. In Jersey, we've actually just been we are in the process of increasing the fees, and a consultation has just concluded. We hope that legislation will pass the states after the forthcoming June 7th elections. But in Jersey, maximum fee would go up to £1,600. In Guernsey this year, it's almost £2,500, whereas in the UK it's just over £3,700. And then there's the Alephman with £50. So are you aiming for an increase?

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Yes, is the short answer. And we I think we have to. I think charging £50 is figure I think originates from 2011. So the I I did a lot one of the first things that I did, I think, when I arrived in the office, apart from trying to get to know my team and spending an awful lot of time listening to them, was the f I was thinking in terms of quick wins, what can I do that is going to really help me solidify some good foundations here? It was thinking I realized very early on we needed more staff and we needed more money. And I spent the first few months of my time in office drafting a very big paper to go to Treasury, essentially setting that out, setting out the needs of the office. Because I knew that, speaking really candidly, I knew that I had one shot at that to get it right while I was still fresh. Because I thought, perhaps quite cynically, I suppose, if I was seen to be doing a good job in post, there might be a sense of, oh, she's all right. Maybe she doesn't really need any more resources. Maybe she can make do with the team she's got. So I thought if I go in really hard initially, ask for this, and then show them what I can do with those few resources, that's going to be that that was the approach that I took. And I'm really glad in hindsight I took that approach. But I think when so I was given approval at that point in early January last year to consult on the fees because that fees piece of regulation is owned by our Treasury team here. So I drafted, I produced a consultation, I really looked carefully at what the UK jersey guerns are doing. And in some ways, it was easier to go last, which was always beneficial to see what other people have done before you. And again, I'm so grateful for my regulatory counterparts for just being spending time with me and talking through what worked for them, what they wish they'd have done differently. That was all brilliant for my office. Because again, at the time there were five of us, and I'm not a statistician, I'm not an economist, as I said at the beginning. I'm not numerically minded at all. Otherwise, I'd have been at NASA.

Paul 24:54

Welcome to my world.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

So I had none of that, and I had no budget to go and hire a big four consultancy to help me model any of this. So I set out what I thought was a fair, risk-based, tiered approach. I went out and consulted on that between October and December last year. And that essentially was based on employee headcount. So three, there were three tiers that we proposed. And I heard some really interesting feedback that even though the majority of people were in favor of what we were proposing, there was a there was an ask that we would include a turnover-based clause in there as well. So I listened really carefully to everything that I heard. I was I worked with the Alabama government statistician to help me refine my thinking further. And what I came out with, I published my response a couple of weeks ago and I've reduced the rates slightly. So still three tiers. I've added a turnover-based clause that will only affect the top 9% of businesses on the island. So everything I've done, I've tried to be fair, I've tried to be considered, I've tried to be evidence-based. And overall, we're getting, I think, positive feedback. The majority of businesses and people I engage with recognise that the office needs investment, it needs funding, and that the only way that can really be achieved and for us to have independence in principle and practice is for bigger organizations to shoulder more responsibility. And people generally seem supportive of that here.

Ralph 26:17

That's really interesting. I mean, having talked to people like Brett, Emma, Paul Vane, all of the commissioners from the various islands, across the Alex, the Bermuda Commissioner, who's now gone to Australia, you know, that they often say that one of the issues working on Ireland is like everybody knows each other and nothing is actually secret, and you can give away things very easily without meaning to, let alone the problems we all have on social media being more connected. So I'm just wondering, what is there about Man, the Isle of Man, that gives you unique challenges compared to anywhere else?

SPEAKER_00 26:51

I think it's a really interesting position. And I was talking to a peer about this very recently, and I think for me there's something here, if I think about my cultural studies background, I'm an outsider to the Isle of Man, and I'm trying to get my head around Manx culture and the fact that there is a concept in the Isle of Man called skeet, which is gossip, which can I think form as a part of social capital, which I think on a lot of island, in a lot of island contexts, you have the same idea. I think for me, again, it's about it automatically goes for me, everything goes back to the kind of fundamental right to privacy and a private life. And I try and keep that at the forefront of everything that I do here. And my team do that as well. There are some really interesting nuances, though, and I hope I'm sure my team won't mind me sharing this. When I arrived, I very early on, I was setting up my inbox and calendar and things like that, all of those things you do when you start a new job. And they'd said for one of the previous commissioners, one of the one of the previous commissioners, their inbox was just open for the full team. So again, that really demonstrates the fact that actually everything in this office is open. So we had to have quite a frank conversation really on, early on, to say, I'm always going to be as transparent as with, I'm always going to be transparent with you. But obviously, there are some things that I need to know at my pay grade, and I wouldn't ever want to stress you out. And you just don't need to know. You don't need to know everything. So that was really at the super microcosm level of my office, you could see this play out, right? There's also a sense of sometimes we see that there's I see this on Facebook, for instance, all the time of posts going to suppose different people's houses and people taking a photograph of the address or the envelope or whatever and putting it online and saying, who lives here? Can you come collect this letter from us? That happens all the time. So there are examples like that where I have to sometimes step back and think, actually, what's the risk of harm here? Is it really worth me getting involved? Is it worth me putting my two cents in yes or no and trying to make a judgment call? But again, I recognize that I'm an outsider. I'm still very much, only a year and a half in, still very much learning the culture.

Paul 29:11

You don't want to step on any toes.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

No. And I don't want to alienate people. And I don't want to come across the data colonizer either. I don't want to come across with my big city, big ICO views that might not necessarily always work for a small island jurisdiction. I think we've got the benefit here of figuring out as an office and the reset that we're going through what works, how to be a really effective regulator in a small island jurisdiction. And we are trying, but I think it's more of an art than a science.

Paul 29:39

Okay, I'm just wondering, you're obviously the US is not a small island community, but somehow I have the feeling that the south of the US also has all these small communities with their own do's and don'ts and approaches. And that's how does this resonate with you?

K 29:56

Yeah, absolutely. I was listening to the sound of the population thinking, wow, I know towns that are smaller than that. And especially like in the deep south. And I will caveat, the deep south is much different than the other south. And I'm from Mississippi, that is deep south. But we also have the Appalachian Mountains and the swamps of Louisiana and different things like that that have their own communities, their own mores, their own habits. And there's no way a regulator would walk into there and get any of those people to do anything they want. Period. If they even made it outsta mountain or out of the swamp, there there would be nothing. So that part absolutely resonates with fitting in the culture. Again, based on being such a small island, do the relationships really play a big role? Because I know it's hard to know 8,500 people, but it's not that hard to know 8,500 people.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

It's a really important point, I think. And for me, I've been I when I came in, one of the first things that I tried to do was really get my face out there because I know that these are people, you know, if even everybody that I meet, I'm gonna, I'm gonna see them in Tesco or Marks and Spencer's or in the pub because it's such a small island. I can't, I have to treat everybody fairly and kindly and nicely. And your reputation really matters on a small island. So it's not as though I'm having potentially having an argument with somebody over an infringement or a breach. And then I can go, I can go home and they'll go back to their home and I'm never gonna won't see them in my social capacity. Here, you have to be, you're always on and people recognize you when you're out and about, but like being a Z list celebrity, which is good and bad, because again, there's the kind of the lack of privacy point as well.

K 31:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:44

I think what's also really interesting for me here, that I haven't seen as much in the UK is that the level of the discourse around the public sector on Facebook and the criticisms that my office and other offices receive personally is something that I haven't encountered before because again, I've never had a public profile before this role. And that has taken some thickening of my skin, essentially. I'm like a little rhino now, I think. It's not nice to read criticisms about you. It's not nice to see people making racist adjacent kind of remarks on your name. That doesn't, it's not nice. And again, I'm certainly not the only person that ever encounters this at all. But that has all been very new for me. And again, there's something about being in a really small context where people are more the media pick up a lot more, they cover a lot more than they would in a bigger jurisdiction. So absolutely everything that we do here is picked up in the press. And then obviously all of that then is uploaded onto Facebook, and then people have opinions. And when I when that then, when I I don't use Facebook particularly often anymore, but when I do and I see my name at the top, I think, oh no. And then I can't resist having a little look. My comms manager has has asked me just to keep off there completely, but you can't resist having a little ski once in a while.

K 33:10

Yeah. And your point about you're always on, you're not off unless you're in the privacy of your home.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm very grateful. I've bought a little tiny cottage outside of Douglas in a little town called Laxey, where it's very much like a little Welsh village, it's beautiful and I can see the sea, and my cats are very happy. So that's like a little kind of haven for me. So I feel like I'm outside of the city, the city being Douglas, which is the size of a kind of a small town in the UK. So I actually leave, I go home, I can rest, and then I come back fresh.

Paul 33:44

Very good.

K 33:45

And when I know we're about to call a halt to this, but before we leave, when we invited you to come on, was there anything that you wanted to make sure that you share with our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 33:56

The only thing really was around gender and AI. That was something that I was really keen to talk about a little bit. Okay.

Paul 34:03

Please do.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Yeah, go right again. If you were to ask what's keeping, I don't know, from a privacy perspective, like what's keeping you awake at night, or something like that might be useful.

Paul 34:12

It's what we always ask Paul Vane during our commit our authority meetings.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Oh, is it?

Paul 34:17

What's keeping you awake at night, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

I think for me as a woman and again, a cultural studies and gender academic, I'm really increasingly concerned with the kind of use cases associated with AI and gender. So just this week, there was this absolutely abhorrent advertisement. I don't know if you've seen it. Picture of a woman blurred with some kind of computer-esque image. And the tagline was, she outworks everyone and she'll never ask for a raise. So the implication there reinforces these stereotypes of women being complicit, tireless, and just undemanding. And for me, there's something there around the impact of AI and the disproportionate impact of AI on women. We already saw at the start, the end of last year, the start of this year, the XAI Groc use cases around those absolutely horrendous and heinous images of women and vulnerable people being produced through through through using AI and deep fake technology. And again, we're seeing AI now essentially just misogyny, new forms of misogyny, new forms of gender-based violence. And I think it's it really concerns me when we're seeing AI used as a tool to amplify gender-based violence and online harassment. And that for me is absolutely horrifying. And the technology and the use cases associated with this technology are moving so fast. And gender, obviously, gender bias showing up as well. It's what really concerns me, though, is the fact that this these outcomes are not inevitable. And the systems that are producing, I suppose, these outcomes are designed by people and with better data, more diverse teams, and much stronger accountability. AI instead could be used to challenge this stuff rather than exacerbate some of this stuff. And that that is increasingly worrying me.

Paul 36:08

But that would also mean that we would need to restrict the echo chamber effect upon development. Yeah. And that requires women to be involved in development as well, and not just leaving it to the tech pros.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

I agree. And I saw this really interesting, it's a really interesting meme, which probably shows my elderly millennial status. I still follow memes. And it was something around women in phlegm rather than women in STEM. PHEM being philosophy, humanities, literature, social science, something else. And I think it was the one of the co-founders of Anthropic said women in social sciences are needed in these development spaces and in these tech spaces because you bring another diverse perspective. We need diversity. We have to break down these echo chambers. We all have a role to play here.

SPEAKER_03 36:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

And I think the time to do it is now, otherwise, we're going to miss the boat.

Ralph 37:02

And that was going to be my point exactly, not just women, but diverse voices in general. Absolutely. Yeah, I saw something online earlier that was somebody saying, Oh, we need a representative panel to consent on cookies on behalf of everybody. And I was saying, actually, everybody has slightly different needs. And if we have like this majority view or this consensus view, there'll be minority voices that are represented. So I actually think Dr. Alex has given us the perfect out there in in terms of a way forwards that we need to do to tomorrow. So thank you, Dr. Alex, for joining us. We've been serious proof for privacy, and it's bye from us. Goodbye.

K 37:41

Bye. Thank you. Bye.