Who is collecting your data and what's it being used for?

Fascinating that no-one is interested in this...

Probably because it is a very long and detailed article.

I was reading an article about Universal Credit today. It seems that the DWP can't manage to collect data on those who have to be moved onto UC in just one area, Croydon. It takes twelve weeks to move onto universal credit, by which time some people have been made homeless.
So Trump might know all about us, but our own government doesn't.

I thought I was crediting Gnetters with the ability to read long and detailed articles. I'm sure that not all of them can only deal with soundbites...

I don't think I would want the DWP to rely on the kind of algorithms which Google and Facebook use, because they're not very reliable. There would almost certainly be even more mistakes with calculating benefits than there already are.

Fortunately, I haven't had any dealings with benefits agencies for a few years, but my experience was that the administration is chaotic. In the past, all admin was dealt with by a single office - the one where you signed on. These days, each separate bit seems to be processed by separate offices in different geographic locations. It seems that the different computers don't 'talk' to each other very efficiently.

I don't know anything about the admin systems for Universal Credit, but I understand that the merging of so many different benefits is causing problems. The letters people receive are also automated. When I was receiving benefits, I once received three letters on the same day telling me three different things. Finding an actual human to discuss the letters was a nightmare and the person I spoke to wasn't from my local JobCentre. It seems these systems work in real time and generate letters, but don't have the 'common sense' to realise that another piece of data is just about to be factored into the calculation. A human would hang on until all data has been processed, but a comuter doesn't.

It's not that the data isn't there, but the computer systems the DWP uses aren't up to the job.

I read it Maizie. Do I get a gold star?

The first time I became aware of Big Data was a couple of years ago. I had been doing a bit of research on the treatment of women in the Middle East and, all of a sudden, started receiving ads for Muslim dating sites! Google obviously got its algorithm a bit wrong.

Will these do, dd [sunshine}

What is unsettling, I think, is that this a a private company and all the data they have harvested is available to anyone prepared to pay for it.

It's developments like this that make me want to oppose things like ID cards on which all sorts of data could be stored without our knowledge or consent. The article talks of sorting people into different 'types'. What if you were a 'type' that your government wanted to be rid of?

Boobed