The Philosophical Implications of Data Collection
While philosophical discourse often stays within its own academic circles, its intersection with other industries facinates me. Bioethics and Cognitive Science, for example, are both fields that straddle philosophical discussion with advances in technology to offer intellectually novel discussions. As a Design Researcher in the field of cybersecurity, I’m exploring how philosophical theories of law and personhood influence our understanding of how our personal data is protected. We hear about data breaches and the algorithms that make our Facebook ads unsettlingly specific, but what can a philosophical take on the matter bring us?
The other day, I had the privilege of chatting with a philosophy professor who specializes in legal philosophy and democratic theory. While that person wishes to remain anonymous, I was able to share snippets of our conversation below.
Obviously, the issue of data security is something I talk about frequently in my field. Would you say that there is a discussion around digital rights in academia?
I think there are a bunch of related discussions. There’re many I’ve been following concernign how AI and big data affect democracies and the legitimacy of democratic outcomes. So something I’ve been looking at in particular is how disinformation using AI changes the landscape for how democracies work.
There’s a big literacy around privacy that I’m aware of, though I’m not working in that field. However, I think that the angle that you’re interested in is how the philosophy of law interacts with these issues. This is largely because philosophy of law tends to be concerned with fairly abstract principles and arguments, and the applied debates about these issues tends to be carried on by legal theorists in law journals in particular. So these debates happen, but they are outside of my expertise.
Understood. You mentioned just now how the algorithmic processing of data influences democratic institutions. Could you expand on that?
I think that democracies are an attractive form of government because they are able, to some extent, to give us reliable answers to political questions. And a lot of people are worried about the way in which social medias, bots of various kinds, and disinformation campaigns might be able to undermine the validity of democratic decision making.
For any of the major elections that have made headlines for the past 5 years, there have been concerns of one form or another about how social media has been used by political players within and outside the to influence the outcome. There’s an interesting question about whether or not disinformation and political meddling are part of what democracy is.
What’s new is the ability to use these new technologies to affect the outcomes in a greater and more efficient way. So if you think about the accusations of Russia meddling in elections; what level has the US been doing this for a long time? However, what is new is the ability to use social media to reach such large numbers of people in a way that is largely unregulated. When most Americans received their news from major broadcasters, it was harder to affect that sort of coverage in any kind of large-scale way. But what seems to have happened in the 2016 election was that clandestine forces were able to get low-quality information news stories onto the plates of millions of voters on a regular basis. That’s what I think is interesting. It’s not isolated to the 2016 election, and is something we will have to deal with moving forward.
Would you say that there is an inherent danger in getting our news stories from non-traditional sources?
The decline of large media and the death of local newspapers, and the rise of short-lived articles that are more than blogs but less than companies providing the news does open up a risk that was not there before. It was very difficult to affect the way that an established newspaper handled its election coverage. But what’s changed is that, since more and more people are getting their stories online which are more ephemeral, it has become easier to get biases into the mainstream.
In general, young people are more savvy about this stuff than I am or my parents are. I think that the data in the 2016 election shows that most of the really-suspicious contact of disinformation has been targeted at older people. They are the more naiive technology users since they are accustomed to dealing with media that are more reputable, that have a certain quality-control built into them. Younger users would be more aware of something being an ad. So this isn’t a general concern- it’s not like “kids these days” are getting sucked into fake news. It’s more complicated than that. As the landscape is shifting, norms that we used to have about the reliability of news are being deployed when there really is no assumption of reliability.
The GDPR lays out many different requirements organizations must follow in regards to how data is handled. People who use a service can now demand that they have an overview of which data is being stored, their data is now portable, they can erase that data. But something that is particularly interesting to me, which speaks to your point, is that the GDPR bans the collection of certain sensitive data. These include data-points including race, sexual orientation, political affiliation, whether or not that person is a member of a trade union. Would you consider this an effective countermeasure to the issue you were talking about?
No– the label is gone, but the data hasn’t changed. The data that allowed them to identify your race and allowed them to identify your political proclivities is not gone. It’s not like you clicked something that said “I love liberals.” They were able to interpolate that from other things that you were doing. So even if Facebook is no longer creating a label, it’s still at their fingerprints.
If I pause over Bernie Sanders three times, just pause not click, they know what my political affiliation is. So just the fact that they’re not labeling and making it a part of their formal analysis doesn’t change anything about what they’ve been able to collect. So I think that a lot of the moves that are being made in regards to privacy concerns is that corporations are attempting to be more circumspect about how they are interpreting the data, but they are not going to delete information.
That’s a good point. Putting the issue of misinformation to influence political outcomes aside, I often think to myself: “Well, I may get creepy ads but this is the price I am willing to pay for free services like Google Maps and Social Media.” Would you say that this complacency is dangerous?
What we’re struggling with is that many people have the naive view that what is driving companies like Facebook is ad revenue. Because a long time, that was what we were told. However, what we’re seeing is that it’s either not true or not sustainable. The profitability of these companies has to be because of the data that they have access to.
A friend of mine is working on a project about Uber. If Uber is a transit company, it is inefficient and shouldn’t be making any money since they don’t turn a profit on their transit. However, what they are is a data company in the data collection phase. They have data on their users that is incredibly valuable– that’s why Uber is on the Forbes list.
What we haven’t gotten straight on, and governments don’t know what they want to do about this, is how do we want to treat companies that are in the data business? What will happen in the meantime is that the ad revenue will not be worth it anymore. Google and Facebook are starting to realize that placing ads leads to a less engaging user experience. Instead, Facebook will get more and more reliant on selling data. There are more effective ways of getting me to buy stuff rather than showing me an ad 10 times a day.
Once the nexus of data collection and advertising goes away, the problem becomes more extreme. You’ve had the experience where my wife bought plane tickets to North Carolina, and I was browsing on my tablet and got advertisements for destinations of North Carolina. At the level of Augmented Reality, the way that we traverse spaces will targetd with advertisements. This is related to our use of social media, but I believe social media will no longer be the locus.
This is all indeed “creepy,” but would you say that there are any pressing philosophical arguments against the mass processing of data?
It’s hard to make out. I think that a lot of people thinking it’s creepy because it is new and seemingly unregulated. However, it’s not illegal.
What we’re seeing right now is that people are expecting the law of property to give us guidance with what to do about privacy concerns. Do we have a right to privacy? Do we have a right to our data? I think that in philosophy there are three major camps that help us understand property rights.
- There’s John Locke’s view, and the theory of property you get from Lockeian self-ownership
- There’s Kant’s version, which is strange but in many ways similar to Locke’s.
- Marx’s view, which is different altogether.
On Locke’s account, there’s something about our relationship to our own person and to our own bodies that explains what it means to own somethinng. And we need to interrogate that relationship to understand privacy and other things like ownership of data . And on that account there’s an answer– we have a right to privacy or we don’t, and we get there by interrogating the relationship between our body and what we’ve made.
For Kant, there’s choice involved. There’re different property regimes and different ways of thinking about property that that are morally and politically acceptable and we have to make some choices, but they all have things in common and all have a particular relationship to human freedom.
According to Marx, property relations are contingent. They were something that were just created and change over time is simply responding to economic factors. On Marx’s account, what you should expect is that over time, the relationships and the laws governing property that we have will evolve as the forces of production and economy shifts. The laws and rights governing privacy will evolve to consolidate and solidify to eliminate conflicts [between the people and economy]
This Marxist account very much reminds me of the branch of historians known as the economic determinists.
Yes, exactly. I’m no Marxist but I sympathize with his belief that what it means to have a right to privacy, and what it means to have ownership of my data, is not some metaphysical fact. They are socially constructed– they are the kinds of things that evolve out of practices over time. And so on a Marxist account we can see massive economic shifts around the collection, use , and dissemination of personal data. People have strong opinions about how it should be done, but the economy is going to do what the economy is going to do. And if you take Marx’s view, then you would expect that the laws and philosophical convictions about rights will evolve in order to consolidate the economic base.
Marx thinks that there’s the economic base- the ability for the society to make stuff that satisfies human needs, based on various technological and educational factors and resources. You have the superstructure– the ideology which is politics, art and philosophy. This grows out of the base, and its role is to consolidate the base and make it work. At the intersections you have the power relations– who can do what with what. The basic feature of Marx’s account of history is that the driving force is the base. The economy drives changes.
Contextualizing Marx’s position to the state of business and tech. going into 2019, how do you think legislatures around the world will balance data rights and economic forces?
I’m not a Marxist through and through, but what happened is that the data economy is upon us. Data scientists did not wait for lawyers and politicians to think about this stuff and come up with rules. We’re just suddenly living in it, and we will see a series of crises and shocks and scandals which will force the political institutions of the time to adapt. But the changes will not be stopped. It would be ludicrous to assume we could go back to the way things were before this.
Marx’s view is it is because capitalism has this tendency to roll over any opposition- deferring to the most powerful in this base. His diagnosis of history and economies work.
Different countries will try out different ways of regulating the economy and there’s a market that emerges. The countries that do the best at massaging the conflict while stimulating economic growth– they will be the ones that end up being the standard bearers for the new models. The US will do its thing, Europe will do its thing, China will do something completely different. The Chinese model, to the extent that I understand it, is to give up on privacy rights altogether…
I think it’s terrifying for Marxist reasons– his worry that with this technology we should default to assuming that it will be deployed in a way that benefits the rich and privileged, and harms the poor and the powerless.
