Cats

Last year I openly published data about some of the cats that work for the UK government. I ended up giving a talk about it. When publishing the data and giving the talk I skipped over the potential data protection and privacy issues.

Some of those potential issues came up again recently when our family cat, Bugsy, was being transferred to our new home. I was nervous about the cat arriving safe and on time. A friend asked:

can’t you publish some data showing the cat on his journey?

Such a short and simple question. This is my long and complex answer. Most of my friends are patient people.

This post might sound like it is going to be whimsical —ok, there will be some cat whimsy…— but there is a serious point. Publishing and thinking about cat data helped me think and talk about other data things with more people.

Thinking and talking about data protection, ownership and control for cat data will have the same effect. It is pretty important that more people know how complex they are.

This cat data deserves data protection

Different countries have their own data protection and privacy laws. Personal data can be hard to define but at the Open Data Institute we encourage people to look at relevant legislation and start by simply saying:

Data from which a person can be identified is personal data.

If data can be combined with other information to identify a person, that data will still be personal data.

If there is personal data in a dataset then we should consider relevant data protection legislation and the univeral human right of privacy.

At this point I expect that lots of people reading this post will be thinking that a cat is not a person so neither the personal data definition or human rights do not apply.

This is true but, like other animals, cats do have rights. Some people argue that pets are becoming people, in a legal sense, and that animals deserve democratic representation. Perhaps cats do not have data protection rights today but if that might change in the future then perhaps I need to worry about it today.

A cat called Paddington chasing its own tail. Picture by Bill Abbot, CC-BY-SA.

Whilst this would be a fascinating topic to explore unfortunately, to paraphrase a recent article by Luciano Floridi on the rights of robots and artificial intelligence, I’m in danger of chasing my own tail when I should be focussing on the current opportunities and challenges with data that affect people. People like me. Our cat wasn’t moving home in a few year’s time, he was moving now; and I was nervous.

There is a simple reason why I need to think about data protection if I was to publish this cat data. Whether cats realise it or not, their data can refer to people. My cat lives in the same house as me. If you knew the destination of its journey then you would know where I live. If you knew the date when it was being transferred to a new home then you might be able to guess that my old or new home is empty. Etcetera.

So if I was to publish data about Bugsy’s journey I would need to think about the impact on privacy using a methodology like the one provided by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) before I published the data.

Ownership of cat data is complex

I occasionally hear people saying that defining a legal right to personal data ownership will make this process easy. My privacy, my data, my choice. I doubt my cat cares about human laws but, according to the law, I own him. So I might legally own data about my cat and would have the legal right to choose to publish it. Unfortunately data ownership is not that simple and nor is cat data.

How is my cat’s identity defined? Some cats have microchips, and Edinburgh University have even given a library card to a cat so it can prove its identity and demonstrate its entitlement to borrow books, but our cat just has a phone number on its collar. Is that sufficient?

Defining legal ownership of cats in data seems simple.

Meanwhile Bugsy is a family cat. He is owned by me and my wife. It might look like that joint ownership can easily be defined in data, but the world is more complex than my simple model. How is my identity and that of my wife defined? How would we verify our identities to say that we are allowed to track our cat on his journey? Identity management is hard.

And once we get past those issues I might find that my wife disagrees on how the cat’s data can be used. We both own and live at the same house that the cat is being transferred to. The data refers to both of us. My wife might think my nervousness is utterly ridiculous and not worth risking our privacy for. There have been several legal disputes over the ownership of pets. I don’t think it would calm my cat moving nerves if I was to take my wife to court over ownership of cat data.

Meanwhile we’re still missing something quite important. The cat isn’t travelling alone on his journey. He is being transported by an employee of a company. What about that company’s potential rights to own the data produced by their service? What about the cat transporter’s privacy?

Controlling cat data

At this point, when answering that simple question from a friend about publishing data about Bugsy’s journey to make me feel less nervous, I started to talk more about consent.

Data protection isn’t just for the online world. We also need to think about the offline world and the billions of people who don’t use computers.

Giving people choice and ongoing control over how you use their data is becoming more important. It’s one of Tim Berners-Lees three challenges for the web. Some trading blocks, like the EU, and individual nations, like the UK, have decided that it is necessary to put in place new legislation that strengthen people’s rights over data. Consent is not always necessary but the ICO recently published some draft guidance on consent under that new legislation which I could use to help publish cat data.

My wife knows quite a bit about data so could give informed consent which I could record. I could also ask the cat transporter and their employer if they were willing to consent. To be clear I would want to give the cat transporter the choice of saying no. A world where people who transport cats have less privacy than other people does not sound a sensible world.

Unfortunately given the impending journey I did not have time to think about or research the cat transporter’s needs and skills. The ICO’s guidance says that I can assume that “adults have the capacity to consent unless you have reason to believe the contrary”, and I knew how to be open about how I planned to use the data, but without more research I would not know how to design something so that the cat transporter could choose whether to consent, or not. I might mistakenly assume that an online only service was good enough, despite a large proportion of the UK population having no access to the internet or insufficient skills to use it. The cat transporter could be one of those people.

And all I would have achieved by this point was possibly gaining consent. I would not have given the cat transporter control over the data about their journey. With that control they could reuse the data for another purpose, such as reclaiming their petrol costs or seeing what cat data tells us about people moving house around the country. My wife, the cat transporter, their employer and I all had rights to the cat data and should all be able to have some control over its use.

Sometimes you need to keep things simple

At this point my wife and friend both firmly interrupted me and told me I was not being utterly ridiculous but being completely and utterly ridiculous. I was trying to design a perfect solution that would work for many cats and purposes, rather than keeping things simple and starting with a solution for a particular problem. My nervousness about our cat.

My wife rang the cat transportation company and asked them to text us a couple of times during the journey. They agreed, of course. Sensible wife.

Data is complex, and that’s ok

Now you might read all of this and ask:

if we have to think through all of this complexity everytime we’re thinking of publishing data how will we ever build anything?

I don't think the cat is happy I've come home. pic.twitter.com/w11ZwGPv0i

— Peter Wells (@peterkwells) February 24, 2017

The team at the Open Data Institute, where I work, do the hard work to try and make data as simple and easy as possible so more organisations can get data to people who need it.

That requires us to work on lots of things including how to publish data; how people will search for it; the skills they need; how to use it in organisations, large and small, or whole sectors; and how to get data to benefit everyone. Lots of other people do similar things.

But sometimes I wonder if we and other people can make it sound too easy.

So when we’re encouraging more people to do wonderful things with data then as well as the brilliant possibilities we also talk about the challenges using both real examples and whimsical ones like the ones I faced with my cat data. Whimsical tales sometimes help convey simple messages.

We can build a better future with data but we need to solve problems and be realistic about the complexity if we are to build one that works for people. Data is complex, and that’s ok.

In recent years the UK government has got into the habit of announcing that it has employed cats. Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury all have cats whilst the Cabinet Office are about to appoint one. An unusual habit for a government but, I suppose, life should be full of strangeness.

One afternoon I was feeling simultaneously bored and whimsical, a risky combination, so I spent 10 minutes building a UK gov cat register — a list of these cats — which I published on the web.

The cat register is open data. Anyone can use it for any purpose. It is also open for contributions. Anyone can suggest changes and help improve it. Some people have done so already.

This week I created a dashboard for the cat register. That should have been relatively simple too but it took a little longer. Some of my skills are a bit rusty.

A list of cats that work for the UK government might seem like a silly joke – it was 🙂 – but it also gave me a chance to use, and give feedback on, some new tools developed by the Open Data Institute (ODI)’s Labs team.

Here’s what I did. It might help others publish some open data or build a dashboard. If you read it all you’ll also learn who Schrödinger’s gov cats are…

How I built cat register

I started off by pulling together some of the available data: names; the department the cats worked in; the dates when they started (or ended) their work; and social media accounts. Yes, UK government cats have social media accounts: both official and unofficial. The data was gathered into a spreadsheet application and saved as a CSV file.

I will shamefully admit that I did not think too much about the needs of potential users of the data. After all, this was a whimsical experiment which users would be able to help maintain if they wanted to be whimsical too. I also concluded that privacy would not be an issue as animals do not have rights under the General Data Protection Regulation. In less whimsical circumstances I would recommend completing a privacy assessment before publishing a dataset.

I used the ODI Labs’ Octopub tool to publish the CSV file. Octopub automatically creates an open data certificate and uses Github to store and publish the data with all of the functionality that provides.

After that step the data was accessible on the web, openly licensed to make it clear that people can use it and was open for collaboration so that people could help improve it. Do use the cat data, read how to submit some extra data or raise an issue if you want to.

This bit was easy. A dashboard was a little harder.

A minimum viable cat dashboard

To help with metrics and dashboards the Labs team have created Bothan: it brings you information in the form of a free platform for storing and publishing metrics as JSON or simple visualisations. This capability is built on top of another web tool, Heroku, that allows new applications to be quickly deployed to the web.

Bothan’s name is inspired by a pretty obscure line of dialogue about the many spies who died getting the plans for the death star in Return of the Jedi. I suspect the Labs team had many failures when building their tool…

The ODI’s lab teams have also built some sample code which can be copied and configured to present Bothan visualisations as a dashboard using Github Pages (another free tool).

Setting up a Bothan instance and reconfiguring an existing dashboard was relatively easy but automating the process of getting data, like the total number of cats, from the register into Bothan proved harder.

The team recommended Zapier, a web tool designed to help automate workflows. It’s less open than the other tools — I couldn’t easily share my config and the pricing plan seemed to scale fast — but it looked like it would do the job and help get even more cats on the web. The team have even integrated Bothan with Zapier to make it easy. Unfortunately I had to get to grips with the Python scripting language and my last foray into similar stuff was a while ago. Luckily there was help both on the web and in the office.

a bit of Zapier configuration which, to put it another way, says “if there’s a change to cat register, then run an algorithm and store the results in the Bothan metrics platform”

After getting the tech working I shared a couple of early drafts on twitter; got some feedback (at which point I learnt that Google had given me the wrong answer for the total number of cats in the UK (if only searching for data was as easy as searching for documents) and improved it to a point that I was happy to call it a minimum viable dashboard.

There is one bit of configuration and code looking for changes to the cat register and calculating new metrics for those values; whilst another bit is looking for changes to some official UK government data about cats. Everything runs automatically.

You will find a bit more detail and the code for the dashboard on Github. Feel free to suggest new features.

Schrödinger’s cats

You might have noticed that the dashboard has an entry for “Schrödinger’s cats”. The reason for that is quite simple, just like the cat in Schrödinger’s famous experiment I could find no data that confirms whether some cats are alive or dead. I could make an educated assumption, after all one cat started duty in 1964…, but I thought it was worth leaving the status unclear. I simply left them marked“Inactive” and imagined the life of a retired UK government cat.

some cats from the swinging 60’s. Picture courtesy of National Archives via Wikipedia

Anyone who uses the data can make their own assumption about those cats whilst leaving it unclear might incentivise someone to help find the missing data and, perhaps, discover that an elderly cat from the swinging 60’s is still patrolling the corridors and clubs of Whitehall.

That incentivisation is interesting. A good register should, like any data infrastructure, be providing a foundation on which people can build services and find insights but a good dashboard should be incentivising behaviour in line with a particular goal or strategy. My goal was to get even more cats on the web. The register and dashboard was a way of getting other people to help me. Submit more cats.

Publish your own data or build your own dashboard

But enough of cats, for now. My whimsy also helped me explore a little bit of data publishing. Octopub, Bothan, Zapier and Python all turned out to be fairly easy to use so, if you fancy giving open data a go, why don’t you publish your own dataset or create your own dashboard?

You could start with a whimsical project (penguin register anyone?) or perhaps something more useful like this list of data science courses in Europe prepared as part of the ODI learning team’s work for the European Data Science Academy.

If the documentation for each of those tools doesn’t help you with a problem then there are plenty of people around to ask and, once you’ve learnt the answer, you can always suggest ways to improve the documentation and help the next person.

The hardest bit about publishing (cat) data is getting started. Tools like Octopub and Bothan are there to make it easy.

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Update 21 April: since writing this blogpost I have done a bit more work on cat data, privacy and complexity.

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Tag: Cats