Sarah

📝 #FOINotes North Tyneside: £28.5m building purchase with no property strategy. Initial FOI dodged this. Internal review forced admission: "no Property Plan/Strategy in place prior to the building being offered for sale is true."
Pushing back on initial responses to get to the truth.

📝 #FOINotes After Ukraine, Ofcom got enforcement powers for digital sanctions: demand documents from tech platforms, fine ISPs for serving sanctioned Russians, intervene when firms dodge restrictions.

FOI asked for usage since 2022.

Answer? 0 times.

📝 #FOINotes Someone FOI’d their council to uncover the truth about short pints and the alleged “5% head tolerance”.

This is the transparency work I’m here for.

📝 #FOINotes: A request this week revealed that the Historical Railways Estate (the graveyard of old bridges, arches, tunnels and trackbeds) has pulled in £2.7m in rent since 2017.

📣 #FOItools: Small numbers often get suppressed for privacy (<5 rule). Process documents usually don't.
Want to understand how decisions get made? Ask for criteria, guidelines, scoring rubrics, not totals. You'll learn more and actually get an answer.

a black and white clock with roman numerals and a floral design on the face ALT: a black and white clock with roman numerals and a floral design on the face

Small FOI themes always fascinate me, like the sudden run of councils releasing data on public clocks 🕰️
The horologists are mobilising.

Live facial recognition vans launched in Sussex and Surrey Some politicians and campaign groups call the technology "intrusive" and "racially biased".

We are deeply concerned about news regarding the expansion of vans equipped with live facial recognition technology (FRT) cameras to 7 police forces across England. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"What guidance has been followed, what ethical frameworks applied?"
This! In an nutshell - we know that transparency and accountability are key for any AI rollouts. Now, how do we get those in control to do it? 🤔

A decade of evidence: AI gets deployed on people, not by them. No opt-outs, no remedy when it fails, and humans still fact-checking the tech meant to lighten the load.

For healthcare risk and transparency, read this. Zero-trust policy starts here.

'We are more than our disease or condition', but most healthcare AI is trained to see us exactly as our disease or condition. Pattern recognition sees symptoms and diagnoses, not the person experiencing them. That's the fundamental tension.

"When OpenAI upgraded the model and claimed it was safer, the rate of harmful responses actually increased".
This is exactly why we need the AI LEAD Act's product liability provisions. Developers & deployers must be accountable for the harms their AI systems cause, not just their marketing claims.

Calling ALL health data folk: Re UK Health Data Research Service.

The UK gov & Wellcome have pledged up to £600 million to create a HDRS.

Myself & an ace team have been tasked by Wellcome to assess the existing health data ecosystem & identify what is needed to support the HDRS 👇.

Get in touch

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

Opinion | You May Already Be Bailing Out the AI Business Washington is treating the industry as if it’s too big to fail, even as the market sends lukewarm signals.

This week Open AI walked back a call for the govt to backstop financing for its trillion dollar investments in data centers. This was only the tip of the iceberg; a slow bailout for AI firms is already underway. Read more from @ambakak.bsky.social and I in @wsj.com: www.wsj.com/opinion/you-...

A woman in hospital

Women with heart disease are more likely than men to be underdiagnosed, undertreated, and under-represented in research trials.

This persistent gender gap is more than a clinical shortcoming; it is a deeper structural failure in health policy
www.bmj.com/content/391/...