Julia Angwin: Technology? Eventually We’ll Wake Up And Get Over It
I’m meeting Julia Angwin early in the morning in the lobby of Sheraton hotel in Warsaw. She came to Poland to promote her “Dragnet Nation” book; privacy, together with digital surveillance and online censorship are becoming an increasingly important and discussed topics.
Gosia Fraser: Where did your interest in privacy and data protection start?
Julia Angwin: I grew up in the Silicon Valley and I have been a reporter covering technology. One day I realised the companies flourishing there are not only selling the software. Instead, they started selling the data of the users. And so to me that was a real shift. I’ve been brought up in the world where my parents have been working in software and you know, selling it was what they were doing for the living. But there was no data about the users involved and I was in shock. It was about 2009.
G. F.: The awareness of data-driven economy is not very high, at least within the CEE region. People are often surprised with the fact that data is valuable and that what they leave on Facebook or Twitter might actually be of some use to some third parties. Speaking here of advertisers, the awareness of targeting and profiling is similarly low. What would you do to promote this knowledge among generic users?
J. A.: This is exactly the reason why I’ve written the Dragnet Nation book. I think today a lot is at stake and trying to explain privacy and surveillance issues is not that easy as, let’s say, environmental issues. People see how the Dead Sea changes and all are really sad, and so on. Privacy harm is much harder to explain than that. We have all these news about potential election influence and other rumours, but it is hard to prove.
Only occasionally we deal with the situations such as Cambridge Analytica affair, where everything is actually explained to us, like see — these guys took data from Facebook regardless the rules and they used it for that purpose.
This is why I say we need a collective approach towards privacy. Fortunately, Europe has some privacy standards which we unluckily don’t have in the United States, but this is a real problem of everybody as we live in the societies where the tools of surveillance go often unchecked and they can be used for whatever purpose.
G. F.: But what happens on the regulatory level, often stays there. If we speak about the GDPR and ePrivacy, you have to remember that the heavy industry lobbying impacts the regulations as well as their local implementations…
J. A.: But in the U.S. it is worse than here. We don’t have the given backlines of the commercial data protection practices, like right to be forgotten or right to access, right to leave. So there is no way for regulators to crack down on many bad data protection practices.
G. F.: It seems that we took an incredible fancy to all the connected devices. There are some researchers saying there is even a thing that should be called an “Internet of Toys”, connecting all the internet-enabled dolls and teddy-bears, often harvesting sensitive children data. We had this infamous Cloud Pets case. And majority of the consumers doesn’t think about the threats here. What is your opinion on the Internet of Things? Do we really need it? Don’t we have other choice for our future but just accept that everything soon will be connected?
J. A.: I think that obviously right now everybody is trying to embrace everything new. The Internet of Things is generally vulnerable if it comes to privacy and I think that at some point people will start switching back. It will come along with the learning, the knowledge. In general I don’t like these things and I’m really interested in protecting my data and it’s hard to do so with these devices.
I compare it often to the years when we learned how to can food and then we have been eating just this through nearly ten years, and eventually we started waking up and got over it. The same will happen with IoT. Maybe Cambridge Analytica and Facebook will not cause this, but soon it will start.
But Internet of Things is not just the consumer devices. It’s the critical infrastructure, like energy grids, too. The people that work with that stuff are really cautious and in majority they know much about the internet and how hard it is to protect it. Thanks to them I suspect we’ll find some ways to understand that also in the terms of regulation, some things have to be finally hardened.
G. F.: Speaking of digital surveillance, social media are becoming an increasing source of information for various governments. Cybersecurity is being militarised, and we have Chinese and Russian internet models… can we still rely on the internet communication and believe that what we consider as private stays as such?
J. A.: It is hard. There are some tools to be used, like Signal app and VPNs, but government has many resources to control and conduct surveillance. Protecting against it is difficult. I hope it doesn’t go that bad on a wider scale and I take my hope from the fact that the internet is such a decentralised network. In China, people still manage to take the news out from the external internet, regardless of The Great Chinese Firewall. People always invent some ways, but it’s getting harder. The tools used for the surveillance are getting better, too.
G. F.: Do you think that there will be some turning point in the future?
J. A.: I’m actually hopeful for the future as younger people are more and more aware of the issue. What I see is an increasing awareness of the risks and more attempts to regain control over their data. If it will transform into the law or regulation some day — that’s difficult question. And it might be that we have more protections against government than against commercial sector.
G. F.: So who is more dangerous? Governments or commercial sector?
J. A.: I think government still has more powers, they can put you directly to jail. Companies have huge power though. Governments have more obvious powers and companies are intertwined with them, because they give governments access to the data of their products users. But we don’t really know the specifics here. That only means in some ways it is the same issue.
G. F.: Last, but not least — a question from one of my readers, from Twitter. Do you see just the dark sides of big data processing?
J. A.: Data can be used for the good purposes too. And I think more data is used for the public good than for the bad. It can serve for example to discover what people really need if it comes to the public services, the question is if the government really wants to know it.
Often the administration is under-resourced too, so many wonderful things cannot happen.
G. F.: Thank you.
This interview was firstly published in a different form and in Polish language for the purposes of Technology Desk at Polish Press Agency
