2020

Top scientists to be given fast-tracked entry into the UK.

• Top scientists and researchers to be given fast tracked entry to the UK
• No cap on who can benefit
• £300 million made available for research into advanced mathematics

A new, fast-track visa scheme to attract the world’s top scientists, researchers and mathematicians will open on 20 February.

This follows a commitment by the Prime Minister last summer to put science, research and innovation on the top of the government’s agenda.

The bespoke Global Talent route will have no cap on the number of people able to come to the UK, demonstrating the government’s commitment to supporting top talent.

The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said:

The UK has a proud history of scientific discovery, but to lead the field and face the challenges of the future we need to continue to invest in talent and cutting edge research.

That is why as we leave the EU I want to send a message that the UK is open to the most talented minds in the world, and stand ready to support them to turn their ideas into reality.

The Global Talent route replaces the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) route and for the first time UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will endorse applicants from the scientific and research community. The route will:

• provide for a brand new fast-track scheme, managed by UKRI which will enable UK-based research projects that have received recognised prestigious grants and awards, including from the European Space Agency and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, to recruit top global talent, benefiting higher education institutions, research institutes and eligible public sector research establishments - this will enable an individual to be fast-tracked to the visa application stage
• double the number of eligible fellowships, such as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the European Research Council and Human Frontier Science, which also enable individuals to be fast-tracked
• continue to ensure dependents have full access to the labour market
• preserve the route’s flexibility by not requiring an individual to hold an offer of employment before arriving or tying them to one specific job
• provide an accelerated path to settlement for all scientists and researchers who are endorsed on the route
• provide for an exemption from our absences rules for researchers, and their dependants, where they are required overseas for work-related purposes, ensuring they are not penalised when they apply for settlement

The changes are part of the initial-phase wider reforms to enable those with world class skills in science and research to come to the UK as soon as possible.

The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, said:

The UK is a world leader in science, with research and innovation that changes lives being undertaken every day in this country.

To keep the UK at the forefront of innovation, we are taking decisive action to maximise the number of individuals using the Global Talent route including world-class scientists and top researchers who can benefit from fast-tracked entry into the UK.

The reforms to the Global Talent route coincide with ambitious government investment of up to £300 million to fund experimental and imaginative mathematical sciences research by the very best global talent over the next five years.

With around £60 million funding available per year, the investment will double funding for new PhDs, as well as boost the number of maths fellowships and research projects – increasing the pool of trained mathematicians in the UK and providing more freedom for researchers to develop new ideas.

This funding will make sure the UK remains at the cutting edge of maths research, underpinning real-world technological developments, from smoother traffic flow, crime prevention, safer air travel, and smarter phone technology to the use of artificial intelligence and creating greener energy systems.

Business and Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsom said:

Leaving the EU gives us new freedom to strengthen research and build the foundations for the new industries of tomorrow.

By attracting more leading international scientists and providing major investment in mathematics, we can make the UK a global science superpower and level up our country.

The funding forms part of the government’s ambitions to considerably boost research and development spending and establish the UK as a global science superpower, changing the way people live, work and travel.

To ensure the UK is the best place in the world for research and development, the government is launching a major review of research bureaucracy and methods, including unnecessary paperwork, arduous funding applications and research selection processes. This will free up and support the best researchers to focus on groundbreaking, ambitious and meaningful research that goes on to cure diseases or improve our transport networks.

UKRI is already taking steps to reduce bureaucracy, and in the coming weeks the government will be consulting world-leading scientists, researchers, academics and industry figures on what more can be done. As part of this, UKRI will simplify the process to apply for funding, removing the unnecessary requirement to precisely forecast the long-term benefits of projects with unpredictable results.

An ambitious Place Strategy for UK research and development will also be published in the summer to ensure funding builds on strengths of the regions. In addition, this year the government will examine how the UK’s catapult centres can strengthen research and development capacity in local areas, improving productivity and contributing to greater prosperity across the UK.

UK Research and Innovation Chief Executive, Professor Sir Mark Walport, said:

Today’s announcements further underline the importance of research and innovation to the future success of the UK and the government’s continued commitment and investment.

Working with the government, UK Research and Innovation is ensuring that the UK remains a globally leading environment for research and innovation.

Our ambition is clear: to create a stronger research and innovation environment that is focused on supporting talented people and realising the full potential of their work.

Professor Julia Buckingham, President of Universities UK and Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University London, said:

We share the Prime Minister’s vision to position the UK as a magnet for global science and research talent. The Global Talent visa is a positive step towards this for UK universities. The visa route will help to ensure that universities can attract the brightest scientists and researchers to the UK with minimal barriers.

Universities are globally connected and this announcement signals that the UK remains open to talent from around the world. Our universities carry out life-changing research and our knowledge base, economy, and wider society will benefit from the international staff we can attract through this visa route.

The government continues to work closely with the scientific community in developing its proposals and to ensure the UK immigration system attracts the sharpest minds and scientific talent.

The Immigration Rules to bring the visa changes into effect will be made on the 30 January 2020 and come into effect on the 20 February.

Frustrated with federal inaction, California aims to build a “mini” version of a federal agency that is tasked with consumer protection.

Billing it as California’s version of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Governor Gavin Newsom revealed in his proposed 2020-2021 state budget that the new entity — a Department of Financial Protection and Innovation — intends to “cement California’s consumer protection leadership amidst a retreat on that front by federal agencies including the [CFPB]” and “provide consumers greater protection from predatory practices.”

Richard Cordray, one of the architects of the proposal and the first director of the federal CFPB, told Yahoo Finance that the state’s move is monumental.

“California really is a very influential policymaker when it wants to be,” Cordray said in an interview. “This is a major, major initiative that will make a big difference, not only in California — certainly in California — but also nationally.” 

Newsom revealed his overall budget proposal in late January, which includes the new CFPB proposal. More details were introduced in the state legislature on Feb. 1, in the form of a “trailer bill.”

The bill was clear in laying out its purpose.

“The lack of a single regulatory body over providers of financial products and services in California leaves California consumers vulnerable to abusive financial products and practices,” the budget stated. “Unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices in the provision of financial products and services undermine the public confidence that is essential to the continued functioning of the financial system and sound extensions of credit to consumers.”

The proposal pushed for consumer financial protection laws and the new agency. Revisions by the Assembly and the Senate will be decided by June 15, and the bill would then go back to Newsom for his review (i.e. to sign or to veto).

‘There wasn’t a need for this 50, 60 years ago’

The need for a consumer watchdog in the first place was due to the stunning increase in the use of credit, Cordray explained.

“Things have changed dramatically in the last two generations, in terms of the financialization of our lives… People use credit cards more than ever, mortgages… And student loans have proliferated to a degree that they didn't exist 25 years ago,” he said, stressing that Americans overall are “carrying much more debt.” 

But when they run into problems with these financial products, “they're often facing off against big financial companies,” Cordray explained. “And people can get very frustrated when they feel they're being treated unfairly and there's nothing much they can do about it.”

That’s where an entity like the federal or state CFPB steps in to help these consumers out, he added: “There wasn't a need for this 50, 60 years ago to anything like the degree there is a need today.” 

The bottom line for creating such an agency, he said, is to make “sure people are protected, that they're treated fairly, that things are being disclosed properly, so they can make good judgments about the choices they make on their financial lives.”

‘Plugging the gap’ left by the Trump administration

Two factors propelled the California’s mini-CFPB initiative into Newsom’s orbit.

First, the governor is relatively new — Newsom took office in January 2019 — and entered office deeply interested in consumer issues.

“When he was mayor of San Francisco, he tried to do an initiative to outlaw payday lending... and during his inauguration speech, he also talked about predatory lenders, and they have always been on Governor Newsom's mind,” Jan Lynn Owen, the former Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight and currently a senior advisor with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, told Yahoo Finance. 

The second was the rapidly growing concern overall, over who was enforcing consumer protection laws.

“Things have changed in ways that leave consumer advocates very concerned,” Cordray said. “And plugging the gap that's left is especially important.”

Owen noted that Newsom “is focused and he understands the issue, which is pretty, pretty wonderful...  [and] Governor Newsom thinks that it's now time… as the Trump administration continues to undermine and weaken rules at the federal level.”

In a statement to Yahoo Finance, Gov. Newsom responded: “As the Trump administration undermines and weakens the rules that protect consumers from predatory businesses, California is filling the void and stepping up to protect families and consumers.”

California Assemblymember Monique Limon, who had previously introduced similar-minded legislation, and co-authored a “Student Borrower Bill of Rights” or AB 376, told Yahoo Finance that the effort was driven by the fact that “we wanted to do something to advance the consumer protections in the absence of the federal government being able to.”

Back in D.C., California Rep. Katie Porter cheered on the effort: “We need a strong Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will protect everyday Americans from the predatory practices. This is an issue that affects the daily lives of all Americans, regardless of race, income level, or background. When the federal CFPB refuses to do its job, it’s up to states like California to make sure people aren’t getting cheated.”

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

What does this mean for consumers?

So how exactly does this affect American consumers?

For student loan borrowers in California, for example, this move adds oversight into their lenders, servicers, debt collectors, and more — which consumer advocates hail as a win.

“California’s response is a lesson in the power of public policy to improve student loan borrowers’ lives,” former CFPB Ombudsman Seth Frotman, who now leads the Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a previous hearing. “But more than that, it can create a roadmap for how the government oversees all of consumer finance. It can provide the blueprint for California to build an oversight framework that matches the complexity and nefariousness of a financial sector that seems to know no bounds.”

For people like Limon — who said she’s fielded calls from constituents who have been scammed or defrauded and didn’t know where to go — the new agency represents a consistent way to screen the volume and the types of predatory practices that consumers were reporting to address existing issues and prevent abuses from taking place.

Twenty years ago at a Silicon Valley product launch, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy dismissed concern about digital privacy as a red herring: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

“Zero privacy” was meant to placate us, suggesting that we have a fixed amount of stuff about ourselves that we’d like to keep private.

Once we realized that stuff had already been exposed and, yet, the world still turned, we would see that it was no big deal. But what poses as unsentimental truth telling isn’t cynical enough about the parlous state of our privacy.

That’s because the barrel of privacy invasion has no bottom. The rallying cry for privacy should begin with the strangely heartening fact that it can always get worse. Even now there’s something yet to lose, something often worth fiercely defending.

For a recent example, consider Clearview AI: a tiny, secretive startup that became the subject of a recent investigation by Kashmir Hill in The New York Times. 

According to the article, the company scraped billions of photos from social-networking and other sites on the web—without permission from the sites in question, or the users who submitted them—and built a comprehensive database of labeled faces primed for search by facial recognition.

Their early customers included multiple police departments (and individual officers), which used the tool without warrants. Clearview has argued they have a right to the data because they’re “public.”

In general, searching by a face to gain a name and then other information is on the verge of wide availability: The Russian internet giant Yandex appears to have deployed facial-recognition technology in its image search tool. If you upload an unlabeled picture of my face into Google image search, it identifies me and then further searches my name, and I’m barely a public figure, if at all.

Given ever more refined surveillance, what might the world look like if we were to try to “get over” the loss of this privacy? Two very different extrapolations might allow us to glimpse some of the consequences of our privacy choices (or lack thereof) that are taking shape even today.

In one plausible future, many people routinely are offered, and use, technical tools to keep their identities obscure. Call it Pseudoworld. When controlling what is known about us is difficult, the natural path is pseudonymization: establishing online presence without using a real name.

One recent study found that the more sensitive a topic is, the less likely people discussing it online are to use their real names. It recorded about one in five accounts on English-speaking Twitter as plainly using pseudonyms. In Pseudoworld, that will be far more common.

There, to tweet or blog—or sign on to Facebook—under a real name will be seen as a puzzlingly risky thing to do. Just as universities remind students to lock their dorm-room doors, civic education will teach us how to obscure our identities so we can’t be traced online.

We get to Pseudoworld precisely by trying to take individual responsibility for our own privacy. Ten years ago, Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School, asked his students to find personal information online about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, whose remarks at a conference had hinted at McNealy-like skepticism about privacy concerns.

Despite having no access to obvious sources such as a public Facebook account, the students were able to produce a 15-page dossier about the justice and his family, including his home address and his home phone number. Scalia was not pleased, calling the exercise “an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment.”

Of course, Reidenberg’s students had gathered the information as an academic exercise and then moved along. But the assembly of someone’s personal information can turn into a “doxxing,” a public outing of once-obscure or concealed data, which can serve as the basis for online and offline harassment.

The “get over it” theory of zero privacy serves to blame the victims of doxxing, suggesting that if they didn’t want the information getting out, they should not have so cavalierly shared it.

Tracking reputation will still be possible in Pseudoworld. People can simply establish track records under their pen names, and platforms (and other users) might choose to pay more attention to comments by those whose previous comments have been deemed constructive or engaging under whatever standard the platforms want to set.

The science-fiction author Orson Scott Card imagined this in his book Ender’s Game, in which two preternaturally smart kids pseudonymously accrue great respect through their participation on global message boards, and from there influence the course of the world. Appropriate skepticism of the power of the pen aside, there are lots of Twitter influencers who fit this mold.

Read: A grand bargain to make companies trustworthy.

This drive for pseudonymity won’t stop at the porous borders of the online world. Recently, Kate Klonick, a professor at St. John’s University Law School, gave her students an assignment that was the reverse of Reidenberg’s: Instead of seeing what they could learn about a known person, Klonick’s students were to observe nearby strangers during spring break and see how many they could ID.

Their results were successful in a way that was shocking but not surprising; a few snippets of overheard conversation, or a glance at something such as a luggage tag, were enough to seed a successful search.

As that kind of surveillance grows, catalyzed by free-range viral videos recorded wherever an embarrassing incident unfolds, coupled with a contest to name the bad actors and where they work, the demand for pseudonymity will require more than non-revealing Twitter handles.

As yesterday’s locks are supplemented by today’s networked home-security cams, companies will market tools for us to secure the manifold ways in which our identities could leak. Nico Sell (which may or may not be her real name) has led the way: She’s a digital-security researcher who has worked hard to never be publicly photographed without wearing sunglasses.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have designed special glasses to confuse facial recognition without requiring shades, and the artist Adam Harvey has pioneered an open tool kit of new fashions for the same purpose. Next up will be shoe inserts to stymie gait detection, and the commandeering of Auto-Tune to prevent voice recognition.

With its new morning routines of adjusting one’s voice disguiser, gait blocker, and special glasses, Pseudoworld has a lot of clear drawbacks. It requires personal vigilance to avoid identification, with lingering problems if one’s mask should slip. It portends daily social interactions that tilt more toward the configuration of a confessional booth—or a 4chan message board—than an exchange of pleasantries with a store clerk bearing a name tag, or an earnest discussion thread on Facebook with each participant’s home town, relatives, educational history, and favorite book voluntarily one click away.

In Pseudoworld, lots of data mining is still available to companies and governments. Anonymized data from Fitbits and iPhones can still be used to determine well ahead of time if, say, Cleveland is particularly restless one evening—and its people seem to be assembling in protest.

Pseudoworld will happen if the legal frameworks for protecting privacy aren’t updated. In the absence of public protection, and the presence of bandits, we’ll procure what private help we can afford to protect ourselves—and companies will cater to our paranoia. It’s the apotheosis of the internet-as-Wild-West cliché, one that goes at least as far back as internet-as-information-superhighway.

But let’s consider Pseudoworld’s near opposite.

What if the law were tightened up with more accountability for bad actors in an attempt to make us feel more comfortable sharing? Or perhaps Pseudoworld never worked, as the hydraulic pressure of disclosure overcame all the strategies of resistance? We could end up in Transcriptworld.

Here, Facebook’s real-name requirement will have become near universalized. Those who can’t or won’t identify themselves will be excluded. But identification, unlike pseudonymity, won’t be technically burdensome. It will be built into everything we do. An Uber or Lyft ride will record the ID of the driver and the passengers through a fingerprint or facial recognition (thanks, Apple!), along with the exact route they take and at what time.

All other cars will too, especially self-driving ones, with such sensible biometrics as those we use to unlock our smartphones today. Indeed, identification will be belt-and-suspender: Even if the car doesn’t record who and where you are, your phone will, and you’re not giving up your phone.

In Transcriptworld, high-profile privacy cases such as United States v. Jones, in which the police were required to get a warrant in order to place a tracking device on a vehicle, will be quaint, because vehicles will already have multiple tracking devices, and acquiring that information will be as easy as sending a business-records demand to the relevant companies, such as Apple, Tesla, and Verizon—or smaller and sketchier startups such as Clearview AI, designed solely to transact in data.

Doxxing someone in Transcriptworld will be even easier than it is today—Google’s database is hardly shrinking—but here, anyone in the country who engages in it, or harassment based upon it, will face swift and sure punishment in a newly energized legal system, especially because the bad actors’ own anonymity is so hard to maintain. (For those outside the country, it will be a different story.) And short of law enforcement, Transcriptworld will allow private platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to enforce permanent low visibility, or outright bans, for those said to be violating their terms of service, wherever they may be in the world. It’d be as easy as an airline banning an unruly (and vaping counts as unruly) passenger for life—and far less costly to the company.

To get to Transcriptworld from our current time, most alternatives of anonymity simply need to be removed for most transactions, online and offline. That could happen, as with the move to Pseudoworld, through commercial decisions as much as through government action: If identification can be made even easier, storefronts and social-media platforms might decide to try to help themselves to it through facial recognition and other involuntary tools, or require it before serving anyone, especially if identifiable data collection is part of their business model. Already we see a move in physical retail spaces toward the rejection of cash as more and more people have credit cards.

Most people won’t even notice a difference from today, where, in the absence of hard-to-deploy countermeasures, they’re already this traceable.Transcriptworld might then sound like an incremental change to what we have today—indeed, from what we had in 1999—except more bad actors are held to account. So isn’t it obviously more desirable than the constant, exhausting shadowboxing of Pseudoworld?

No.

The Transcriptworld that’s emerging is a decoy, a scrim placed over the complex machinery that slices and dices personal data to multiple ends, invisible to us. It looks nothing like the world of 1999 where we “already” had zero privacy.

Surfing a website or using an app may feel like a solitary experience, but as a duck may coast serenely across a pond while invisibly paddling madly underneath, as soon as you press something—indeed, merely hover over it—more computing power is available to instantly scrutinize that single act than NASA spent sending Apollo 11 to the moon. Data from one place can be used to inform another. A car-insurance company discovers that “writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just ‘tonight’” is linked to better driving, and it can price rates accordingly, by cross-referencing applicants with their social-media accounts.

In the meantime, a playful quiz may be later used to try to hone specific political messages for your particular personality. Inferences can be made not only about you as a person, but about your state of mind at any given moment. Someone who’s recently quit drinking can be offered a drink—or, more subtly, shown a compelling drama whose noble characters just so happen to be hard drinking. Emotionally vulnerable because you lost your job and just had a fight with your spouse? It might be the perfect—or, for you, worst—time to offer you a scammy higher-education degree program, or a car you can’t afford, financed by a payday loan to make you think you can.

Read: Why surveillance is the climate change of the internet.

To be sure, all this can happen in Pseudoworld, too. So what’s really different? Well, background checks for sensitive jobs will include scrutiny of public and private behaviors, including seemingly quotidian ones such as liking tweets about alcohol or using four-letter words. The list of sensitive positions will grow. And, as a counterpart to Pseudoworld citizens’ development of identity-hiding technologies, people in Transcriptworld will seek advice and tools to help shape their behavior so that what’s associated with their identities suits their later job applications and dating prospects. The best companies—and governments—in the system will be a step ahead of people earnestly but still clumsily presenting themselves as different than they are.

Thus Transcriptworld may appear normal, but it’s really the Truman Show, a highly realistic but still completely tailored video game where nothing happens by chance. It’s a hall of mirrors whose horizons and features are digitally generated and honed for each person, in which even what constitutes “normal” is defined by the system: both in the type of world— violent or peaceful, pessimistic or hopeful—that’s presented, and in the ways that people will rapidly adjust to try to avoid the penalties of the system’s definition of negative behavior.

Transcriptworld is a lousy place even assuming, as we have so far, that government’s primary role there is to make sure that people don’t doxx and harass one another. And when government doesn’t embrace the rule of law, Transcriptworld provides the soil—fertilized by commercial data processing—in which to grow the authoritarian nightmares we’ve come to call Orwellian.

There have to be better alternatives than these. To find them, we must overcome the  learned helplessness about the state of our privacy—a helplessness often abetted by technology leaders moving fast and breaking things. Privacy defenders have perhaps inadvertently encouraged the same sense of inevitability by speaking in generic apocalyptic terms. But this fight is not simply about keeping particular facts about people out of the public eye. Privacy now is as much about freedom, the freedom to maintain a boundary between ourselves and those who want to shape us.

We’ll need a combination of old-fashioned political pressure to situate and vindicate privacy rights in law, limiting data collection and use, and the forging of new technical tools to make compliance with that law easier. Restrictions on collection and use of data can bring up short the current race to the bottom, and a follow-on slide toward the paranoia of Pseudoworld.

It should not only be that the lucky few can manage to buy and practice their way into a semblance of even the reduced privacy we enjoy today. Functional anonymity is as valuable in commerce as in speech. The burden shouldn’t be borne by those on whom these technologies are deployed. It must be shared by those who want to know all about us, and who would further subtly shape us according to their own imperatives.