In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, master data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Alice Wallbank, a professional support lawyer for the law firm Shoosmiths, whose clients include Mercedes-Benz, Octopus Ventures, and Travelodge. The company also specialises in working for businesses in both the property and banking sector.

The Financial Times has garlanded Shoosmiths as “one of Europe’s most innovative law firms”, and Alice’s pioneering role at the company – focused on privacy, data, and increasingly AI – is symptomatic of a business in the vanguard of a profession catching up with the broadest implications of technology.

At the start of this year, Alice co-hosted an excellent ‘data insights’ conference – naturally hybrid, both in the room and online – which featured a keynote from Austrian activist and lawyer, Max Schrems. Schrems is famous for his successful campaigns against Facebook (and Meta) for their violations of European data privacy laws.

Before joining Shoosmiths, Alice spent six years as the principal legal counsel for the cyber and information security division of the leading technology business, QinetiQ.

Alice is a passionate advocate of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), describing it “as a good thing for data privacy – without a shadow of a doubt”. Although first introduced in 2016 and in place since 2018, it has its origins in a 1995 directive, designed to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals from Big Tech. Alice believes this showed “remarkable foresight”.

One of the very few people in the UK, Europe, and the world to have read all 90,000 words of the EU’s AI Act, artificial intelligence gives Alice that fabled reaction to trench warfare of “a combination of boredom and terror”. There are huge potential upsides – such as radiography diagnostics – and massive downsides from a system that is “at heart a self-limiting black box” dealing in “biases in, biases out”.

And in a Data Malarkey exclusive, Alice is our first guest in more than 40 episodes … to sing. She dons her white stilettos, dances round her handbag, and turns the clock back to 1984 for a tuneful rendition of Rockwell’s dancefloor smash, Somebody’s Watching Me – for Alice, an insightful foreshadowing of data privacy issues 40 years into the future.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Shoosmiths home page – https://www.shoosmiths.com

Alice’s profile on the Shoosmiths’ site – https://www.shoosmiths.com/people/cvdetails/alice-wallbank

Alice’s article on Ashley Madison – https://www.grip.globalrelay.com/could-the-ashley-madison-data-breach-happen-today/

Another blog from Alice, this time on the environmental credentials of GDPR.

The EU AI Act – all 90,000 words of it – here

Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me from 1984 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YvAYIJSSZY

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.