This may not be the sexiest subject in the world but its an increasingly important; for negative and positive reasons.

I’ve just been at the 74th International Meeting of the Psychometric Society and it emphasised just how sophisticated we’re getting in our ability to gather data and analyse it to find out anything from  whether 6 foot tall people will be any good at selling to how quickly the world’s going to end from global warming or how many people will catch swine flu. The statistics used in tests are also used in these areas.

The bad ( is it ? - that’s my view but you may disagree) side of this is that, because our ability to gather data and analyse it is developing, we’ve therefore decided to use this technology, come what may. 5-10% of the UK population is on the national dna database; 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK backed up by increasingly sophisticated behavioural, face recognition and posture recognition software; most shop loyalty and credit cards build up consumer profiles and the proposed National Identity card is, in essence a biodata test. Integrate data from these sources ( as on a computer such as Schengen II, which is designed to do this ) and you can profile people about what jobs they’ll do, how long they’ll live, what they’ll buy, what illnesses they’ll suffer from  and whether they’ll blow something up. How accurate those profiles are is the 64 mIllion dollar question.

You can read more about this in Surveillance Unlimited  by Keith Lander. Is not sci-fi or a deliberate scare story.

It has implications for us as test users. Increased automation of processes, inflated computer memory and other advances tempts us to keep more data for longer, use it for different things and minimise human interaction in testing. If we do this we may be breaking the law. How many of us have:

- kept data from a testing sessiom because it might be useful;

- forgotten to explain to test subjects exactly and comprehensively what test data is going to be used for;

- relied on automated decision-making about test subjects;

- gone back and eleted data we don’t want.

If not, we may, as I say, be open to legal action. Of course these are generalisations and its well worth going back to read the Data Protection Act or the advice on test data protection available from the Psychometric Testing Centre of the BPS. Even  more, we should ask our test suppliers what they’re doing to keep test data secure on their systems.

You may disagree but I think the data that comes out of tests and what you do with it will be at least as important in the next 20 years as the technical standard of tests has been over the last 30.

The negative one