Citizen and Consumer: What our data means for us and our societies

The daily Facebook scandals, privacy debates and psych profiling, have left me deeply unsettled. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out, I wasn’t shocked, it was a confirmation of my paranoia. If to sell good and services you can target people based on their demographics, where they live and what they like, you can do the same thing for politics too. For a while now, all social networks have become shriller, more divided and abusive. When the Cambridge Analytica Scandal broke, though, it us showed how we’re using data to manipulate people. This hurt me on a deeper level too, as a marketer who used the very same tools, how was I any different from these operators?

Data and marketing have always gone hand-in-hand, that’s how you target your campaign and measure its success. What made me uncomfortable are two specific things: are humans just data points and who owns the data we’re generating. If you’ve read Everybody Lies, which I recommend, the author, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, talks about how as a data scientist he’s interested in discovering trends in the data, not necessarily explaining those trends. After all, those regressions are there to predict what we do, not try to make sense of it.

In my opinion, this emphasis on modelling and prediction, effectively reduces people to data points, who then move along predetermined paths, that they are not aware of, with probabilistic actions. To my mind, this is a very deterministic model, one where people are not expected to exercise any agency or will. We, the people, are all just little predictable little data machines, following paths that we’re not aware off, led on by shiny pictures and dopamine releasing apps. I would like to believe that humans may be a little more than that. Well, unless you’re a Westworld fan, in which case, ‘human behaviour works via an algorithm, we are composed of only 10,247 lines of code.’ Humbug.

The second question, of data ownership,is not just a question of consent. It’s not about asking people to ‘agree’ to terms and conditions or end user license agreements. Both of those methods seem to privilege the platform over the user (here is a Cracked article from 2012, because this has been happening for a long time). It’s a question of whether we, all of us, understand the implications of the data we’re generating with every action we take on our devices. On this, I have seen core users disdainful of us lowly users who do not employ ad blockers, the tor network and exotic Linux distros. They may be right and they tell us so, but it leaves the majority of users out in the dark. On some level, scary data usage, is a lot like climate change, we tend to ignore it, until the next tsunami or data breach actually affects us. (I was asked to log back into Facebook, thanks to the last data breach that affected 50 million users.)

I think at the core of both these questions, is a simpler question: all firms design products and services keeping the user first, but is this user a consumer or a citizen? Now I am not trying to imply that the user is one and not the other, in ‘liberal democracies’ we’re both. But when we’re on the internet, we’re using platforms that are built and run by for profit companies, looking to increase revenues. The platform, while providing us whatever service we’ve signed up for, will use our data to sell us more stuff to generate more profits. For a consumer this works. (for example, here’s how Amazon puts the consumer first.)

For a citizen though, the questions move away from individual choices to those that affect that larger society that we’re a part of. When we troll someone or make vitriolic statements, the platforms are built to reinforce those beliefs by selling us products and opinions that echo those beliefs. There is also research that this makes us more hardline in our previously held opinions (‘Why every social media site is a dumpster fire’ by Vox on youtube). Yet, aren’t democracies supposed to be about ‘rational’ arguments, debate and compromises that help us move in whichever direction the society decides it wants to go in? So if all of us citizens are stuck in chambers which reinforce our biases and cleaves us into distinct groups and sub-groups, how do we even begin to start a dialogue?

The other question that emerges from this is, whether the for profit platform should be responsible for ensuring that they look at users at citizens too. But would such a company be able to or even be comfortable with doing that? And if that’s not the solution, would we as users want out governments to create these platforms for discussion? Wouldn’t that just become a hotbed for propaganda?

I think these are important questions to ponder on, when we as a species face global threats of changing climate, fractured politics and a general apathy, that need global solutions. I don’t have an answer for this, instead I would love for us to start a dialogue, to realise that we all have some common ground, even if we have forgotten it in our cozy digital echo-chambers.