Mhoraig Green on the importance of ethics in data collection

I'm due to speak at a major conference in Edinburgh about how Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) is developing the way we work with data, and the importance of protecting your privacy as we do so.  

Last year we gave advice to almost 192,000 people in Scotland. When you help so many people you also build up a vast evidence base about the challenges faced by people. 

We use that evidence to inform government, regulators and businesses of the human impact of their public policies, and so persuade them to make changes that make a positive difference in people’s lives. 

In 2024 CAS launched foreCASt, which is a new quarterly webinar that brings that evidence base to new audiences, showcasing our data and insight into the issues that are affecting people in Scotland and forecast the solutions we need to see to improve people’s lives. 

In recent years we’ve been thinking about what more can we do with our evidence. How can we use it more effectively to help improve our services and to tell the story of the difference we make?

We’ve used Data Orchard’s data maturity framework to understand what we are doing well and where we need to improve and develop. One of the issues we’ve faced is how do we make use of the data that we gather while making absolutely sure we don’t compromise on our cast iron commitment to confidentiality for each person who comes to us? 

This has been really challenged as we became involved in some pioneering work using artificial intelligence (AI). We recently wrote in TFN about a new AI tool that helps advisers in our Extra Help Unit to identify the most urgent issues amongst the vulnerable energy consumers who turn to the unit for help with their energy complaints. We’ve also been exploring how AI can help support Citizens Advice Bureau advisers to spend more time focusing on the people who come to us for advice, and less time at a computer updating records.  

All of this innovation comes with risk because we’re working with new and relatively untested technology. The privacy of people who use our services is really important to us, so developing expertise around data protection and ethics has been a key enabler to these projects. The right to privacy is one of the areas of human rights that will come under increasing threat as a result of AI.   

So we’ve spent a lot of time and effort getting data protection right by minimising the data that goes into AI tools and pseudo-anonymising it where possible, making sure the data doesn’t leave our systems, and only using AI tools that we trust are secure. We also weigh up the benefits that any tool can deliver with any potential risk before letting it near live data. We believe this is important work because AI is not going away and it has the potential to make an enormous difference to the way we work and the benefits we can deliver for the people of Scotland.   

We can get this right, but the key point I will be making at the conference is that we will never do anything that will compromise on the cherished values of trust, integrity and confidentiality that have been our watchwords for 85 years. 

Mhoraig Green is the head of strategy, governance, performance and risk at Citizens Advice Scotland.

This column was first published in the Herald www.theherald.co.uk