Owen Boswarva
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owenboswarva.bsky.social
Owen Boswarva
@owenboswarva.bsky.social
2.4K followers 2.1K following 2.8K posts
A mix of stuff: mainly #opendata, #dataprotection, #geospatial, #datapolicy, #ddj, #genAI, #govtech. Links and half-formed thoughts posted for my own amusement. Still on Twitter at @owenboswarva. Sites: www.owenboswarva.com and www.datadaptive.com. He/him.
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owenboswarva.bsky.social
On the interaction between WPQs and FOI requests, see this post by @alexparsons.bsky.social:

When MPs/Peers should use FOI rather than Parliamentary Questions www.mysociety.org/2025/07/01/w...

I also touched on this subject earlier in the year www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ga...

#FOI #opengov
November 24, 2025 at 9:25 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
Related links:

John Edwards's recent evidence to Commons SITC committees.parliament.uk/event/25296/... + follow-up letter committees.parliament.uk/publications...

ICO call for views on enforcement procedure ico.org.uk/about-the-ic...

#Afghandatabreach #dataprotection
November 24, 2025 at 8:25 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
(By kids I mean boomers) #screentime
November 23, 2025 at 2:56 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
(The site itself remains operational but is now geoblocking the UK)
November 22, 2025 at 3:01 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
This is poignant – perhaps Lizbeth should be more confident in her own lyricism but at least her productivity is up
Lizbeth used to write about one novel per year, but now she can do three per year, and her target is five. She told me that she thinks ChatGPT is 'better' than her, saying that the newest version of ChatGPT is 'so much better than I am at prose'. She explained to me that people's idea that ChatGPT will never be better than humans is maybe true in the first instance, but it will become better. When I asked what made her think it was better than her, Lizbeth described that its vocabulary is better than hers, and she has certain prejudices in the words she does and doesn't use, but she feels the system is very open, so it might be 'more lyrical than I am'.
November 21, 2025 at 4:38 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
The report itself is agenda-driven – and fully on the side of the copyright maximalists – but more nuanced than may appear from the Guardian coverage. There's interesting detail on how authors (most of them anonymised) are integrating AI tools into their working processes.

#genAI #IPlaw #techpolicy
He told me that while he won't judge how people are using AI, there should be an element of creativity involved. Creativity, he explained, is something that only us humans have; AI is not creative by itself, but when used by humans in the right way, that can be a creative process. Jason did admit that there is something lost when we use AI to write, but said that this is the case with all new technologies: 'When you're writing it out yourself, there's something […] that we're kind of losing if we let AI do it all for us. I agree. I think there is something lost there, but I think anytime technology comes in and gives us a boost as a society, something is lost. But something is also gained, and what is gained is bigger than what is lost.'
November 21, 2025 at 4:24 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
Indeed – I'm regularly struck by the irony that UK public bodies can normally only publish or release their own address records if they *have not* undertaken the good practice of quality-assuring them by comparison to PAF or AddressBase i.e. the supposedly authoritative version.
November 21, 2025 at 3:00 PM
owenboswarva.bsky.social
Letter from the UK Information Commissioner following up on his evidence to Commons SITC last month committees.parliament.uk/publications...

Mainly about the #Afghandatabreach, Government use of third-party outsource partners, and TikTok's use of children's personal data

#dataprotection
November 21, 2025 at 12:56 PM