The digital rights movement needs to be as strong as possible if we’re going to win the fight against surveillance capitalism. Critiques like yesterday’s Slate article help us get there.
Yesterday’s Slate piece cover story by April Glaser, which argued that digital privacy advocates aren’t doing enough to reign in Facebook and other tech companies whose business models rely on targeted advertising, rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The question at the heart of the piece — Why aren’t we seeing more action from privacy groups? — is a good one, and as the sub-headline points out, “the digital crusaders who pushed back against America’s surveillance state are crucial to reining in Facebook.”
I found a lot to agree with in the piece — hence my tweet calling it “right on the money.” Glaser is absolutely right to point to the libertarian legacy of J.P. Barlow and other cypherpunks, along with the cultural affinity that many in the digital rights movement share with the techie/developer crowd, as one explanation for the focus on government surveillance as opposed to corporate surveillance. Just as importantly, the piece shines a deservedly harsh light on the too-often classist, color-blind, and overly legalistic approach that has characterized much of our movement. And while the question of how much funding streams influence organizations is a complicated one, it is awkward that many online privacy groups receive substantial donations from Silicon Valley.
But the piece also got several important things wrong. First, it’s simply incorrect to say that “lawmakers are not hearing from the groups that focus on internet privacy.” All sorts of privacy rights groups have been conducting briefings on Capitol Hill, publishing high-profile op-eds, hosting televised panel discussions, and doing even more behind the scenes. Second, the piece quotes a congressional staffer as saying that “a grass-roots campaign to capitalize on the immense public interest in these issues” would go a long way, but before you can do that, you have to know what you’re advocating for, and this is a very, very hard issue. The truth is that no one knows yet what the correct legislative fix is for this problem, and organizing a grassroots campaign around “do something! Not sure what, though” would be a waste of time and energy. And third, on a closer reading, the quoted interviews with representatives from EFF, CDT and OTI don’t back up the article’s assertion that “these groups [don’t seem to] want to lead the way on whatever regulation emerges, or that they seem completely unprepared (or unwilling) to do so.”
The same paragraph asks, “How could digital privacy advocacy organizations not already have strong proposals for what lawmakers need to do to ensure corporations aren’t sucking up inappropriate amounts of data?” As Glaser notes, this is a sharp contrast to the post-Snowden era, when privacy groups came out guns blazing against government surveillance.
As I wrote on Twitter last night, I see two reasons for the privacy rights movement’s focus on government surveillance rather than corporate surveillance: the problem we’re facing now is much harder to both understand and explain, and we don’t actually know how to fix the problem without creating new ones.
First, it’s a lot easier to understand, and to explain to others, how government surveillance hurts people. It’s a problem society has been dealing with for a long time, so we’ve developed not only laws but also a common vocabulary to talk about government surveillance and how it hurts people. That makes it easier to craft campaigns that reach lawmakers, donors and the general public. In contrast, this surveillance capitalism of which Google and Facebook are the biggest, scariest examples is much more recent (with roots in the mid 20th c.), harder to conceptualize, and extremely difficult to explain. (This short blog post from Rebecca MacKinnon is a good overview, and you can read Shoshanna Zuboff’s journal article here).
This is a HARD concept to really understand, much less explain to people who aren’t really motivated to understand it. One tech exec I recently tried to discuss this idea with dismissed the concept as clickbait, and I’ve struggled for years to explain to my friends and family why they should do periodic deep dives into their Facebook and Google account settings, why I’m so opposed to so-called “home speakers” like those made by Google and Amazon, and how these things relate to the Cambridge Analytica, Putin’s geopolitical ambitions, Brexit, and the 2016 elections.
The second big reason I see for privacy groups’ cautious approach to fighting surveillance capitalism is the huge potential for negative externalities. In particular, legislation crafted for the U.S. context are likely to have unforeseen consequences for people in other countries. For example, we’ve been hearing calls to hold Facebook and YouTube responsible for certain content hosted on their platforms, but as digital rights activists have been arguing for years, intermediary liability regimes are used by repressive governments all over the world to deputize social media platforms to censor user expression, resulting in clear violations of the right to free expression. The threat of bad regulation leads advocates to move cautiously, and wisely so.
For all its limitations and shortcomings, I’m glad April Glaser wrote this thought-provoking piece. I am increasingly convinced that surveillance capitalism poses an existential threat to liberal democracy and to the human rights it (imperfectly) protects. Fighting back against it is going to take an all-of-society efforts, from government regulation, to companies innovating new business models that *don’t* rely on sucking up all our data, and it’s going to take strong civil society movements to lead the way. The digital rights movement needs to be as strong and effective as it can possibly be, and we’re not going to get there without some painful self-reflection. I hope this piece helps us do that.
