The Sword That Shapes the Hand: Data Liberty as a Human Right
Data privacy is having a moment. Publications such as the New York Times and Forbes have been reporting extensively on the importance of data privacy on the internet and its role in public safety. U.S. lawmakers are shambling to attention, following Europe and Japan, with bills such as COPRA, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act. Pew Research from this past year reports that “just 9% of Americans said they had a lot of control over the information that is collected about them” and 91% believe “that consumers have lost control of how personal information is collected and used by companies.”
Data privacy is having a moment because a consequence of living in modern times is the practical inability to opt-out of data collection. And that data collection is being used for much more nefarious purposes than selling us shoes. Companies like Facebook harvest, analyze, and predict on a mass scale our individual personality types, political affiliations, and behavior patterns based on our online behavior. It requires specialized knowledge and constant attention to perform the work necessary to keep personal information out of the hands of online advertisers and manipulators, attention that many citizens simply don’t have time to give.
At the same time, it is now apparent that many organizations that gather and sell online behavioral data have shifted from advertising to active behavior change.
Exponential Begettings
There is a reason that the top five of the top six companies in the world 1) are data companies and 2) excepting Microsoft, were not on the list 20 years ago, and it’s because data as a commodity has never been so powerful. It’s never been so powerful because it is a resource that begets itself. The more information a company has on a consumer, the more likely that company is to be able to sell something else to them, which then is further informational evidence as to how that consumer shops. Netflix watches what you watch so they can then create more content that viewers like you will enjoy. Harmless, right? But when combined, these data points have an exponential effect on each other. It’s one thing to know you’re a 36-year-old woman from Maryland with two kids that likes murder mysteries. it’s another to combine that with your favorite shopping locations, your political ideologies, your college, your schedule, your budget for the year, your bank, your religion, and your menstrual cycle. These data-scraping feedback loops are money-mining machines. And we are the mines, endlessly providing the further raw material for the tech giants.
If it feels as though there are external forces inflaming racial, social, and socioeconomic tensions, it’s because there are.
We saw starkly the results of our data for sale on the open market over the elections of 2016. Facebook put a price on each data point, and the voter manipulation firm Cambridge Analytica used that data to stoke fear and anxiety. This further subdivided already divided communities in America, the UK, and beyond. I think this is worth driving home — a company used data to find out which populations were most vulnerable to manipulation and behavior change, and then manipulated them using fake rallies and aggressive messaging into more extreme political beliefs. If it feels as though there are external forces inflaming racial, social, and socioeconomic tensions, it’s because there are. Sex sells, but apparently, hate sells even better.
The cable news climate is potentially just as inflammatory, but therein lies the difference — you can turn off the TV. It is effectively impossible due to work or social life not to use either Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Netflix. (Apple gets a pass for now by being forward-thinking regarding data privacy, though the jury is still out regarding labor conditions abroad.) Make no mistake, every one of these companies is a data company. They each sell our information in some way or another to advertisers.
The recent action by Google and Twitter to ban political ads is a step, though a haphazard one that was forced on them in the court of public opinion, and a symptomatic fix instead of a causal one. We cannot expect these companies to police themselves, because they are fundamentally incentivized to get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to providing a service that harvests data.
Magnitudinal Orientations
After climate change, which is the most physically existential threat on the horizon, the collection and misuse of our personal data is the biggest ideological threat to continued existence as know it. We see, as in China, how each tech or media company adapts its business model to fit the region in which it’s operating. Human rights are an afterthought, and because these platforms provide us with some good information and cute cat videos and pictures of our friends and a good email search, we believe that the platform itself is fundamentally Good and Useful™. In actuality, as they’re designed right now, they are fundamentally detrimental to societal integrity.
Personally, I have always been a believer in the great equalizing power of the internet. I watched it grow from the dial-up days to what it’s become today. I believed it would decentralize power and bring about a revolution of individual autonomy, create nodes of free thought, and an economy of ideas liberated from hierarchical control. Instead, it has created the opposite — consolidated power and money in the few and created a new class of global winners that have the tools to shape the world even faster and more completely than the power brokers of the 20th century.
“[Your Name Here], Fire! And it was set by [group you already disliked]!”
In fact, I would argue that the freedoms outlined in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights are effectively useless when companies know everything about us and sell to those trying to affect our ideologies: The First Amendment becomes moot when true fact-finding analytical journalists are drowned out by saber-rattling and hatemongering. This is the data equivalent of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, except worse because it’s like yelling “[Your Name Here], Fire! And it was set by [group you already disliked]!” The Second Amendment is useless if we have our beliefs manipulated to the point that we are ready to use force against our perceived enemies, but those enemies are just another group being manipulated toward hate. The Fourth Amendment is pointless if police can demand data from Google to find out within 3 percentage points that you were within 10 feet of the scene of a crime. And on.
The truth is that many tech companies, fueled by the power of predatory capitalism, have grown by several orders of magnitude beyond their humble origins at the turn of the millennium, and that has changed their nature and the way they relate to regulators. Google has changed their creed from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Don’t Be as Evil as the Next Guy.”
Absolute Spreadsheets Corrupt Absolutely
The regulators whose job it is to keep these companies from running roughshod over our rights have effectively abdicated responsibility. Facebook knowingly sold ads to operatives aiming to affect electoral results in the United States, Israel, and Turkey with the clear intent to sow discord and inflame tensions in our republic. Period. And the U.S. Congress’s reaction was to bring Mark Zuckerburg in front of a committee and deliver a series of scoldings as confused as they were ineffective. (“Senator, we run ads…”)
The power of Big Government next to Big Tech and Big Data is laughable. The American government is a dinosaur, barely able to turn its head to see where threats are coming from next. We are draining our resources fighting ever more tenacious perceived threats, while the electorate’s education is usurped by foreign actors whose only aim was to see the country at war with itself. Well, mission accomplished. No wonder the people think the Federal Government is no longer working for them and are ready to vote for a change, any change.
Tireless pro-democracy activists like Stacy Abrams are currently working on their own data-gathering movement that was outlined in the Constitution: the Census. The goal* of this one, however, is not to sell us more stuff faster and cheaper or make us hate our neighbor, but to merely count the number of people that exist in the country and their basic demographics. This is to figure out how to distribute tax dollars effectively, and to see which parts of the country are struggling the most. The Census is a once-a-decade attempt at getting a handle on who lives here and what they need.
*(A quick note on those that believe the Census is negative: it’s not without its issues, of course, including data privacy, but decrying the Census as a whole is like going to the doctor but not telling her where you have pain because she doesn’t wash her hands. Problematic, but not disqualifying. Anyone telling you that the Census is an overall bad idea is trying to take power away from you. Pay attention to mismanagement, but let’s try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Effective voter counts are imperative for a functional democracy.)
I’ll return to the Census in another post, about how we might solve the government’s big, clunky data-gathering apparatus and make it work more effectively for the people.
But that’s just the thing — we trust tech companies with everything: pictures of our children, our saucy texts and photos, our most secret thoughts, our interests, our political opinions, and who comes to our front door. Basically, everything that makes us who we are, for as long as they want to keep it. Yet, when the government — for whom we vote and theoretically hold accountable for their promises — asks how many people live in our house, we act as though it’s the biggest inconvenience of the decade, or mistrust the intentions completely.
It Do Be Like That
At the end of the day, Big Tech is not being held accountable. I don’t know how to hold them accountable if our lawmakers will not do it, because tech companies have woven themselves so inexorably into our lives. I have a hunch that municipalities of every size are utterly terrified of taking them on because, to borrow from 2008, from the outside they seem too big to fail. Companies can buy out states if they wish, or operate somewhere else on a whim and take their educated workers with them. (I’m not sure why that would be such a bad thing if they’re not paying taxes, but I never finished my mail-in B.S. in Economics.)
What I do know is that data is the new currency. Facial recognition, behavior prediction, targeted advertising, demographics, dark design patterns — these tools are the ones that will shape the next election, the next few years, perhaps the next century of human society as a whole, and are already having huge geopolitical effects. We have seen what happened with Brexit, with the election of President Trump, and the difference it makes when companies actually put privacy forward or just perform lip service. Data and metadata are becoming exponentially more powerful forces that individuals are literally giving away for free (or, more accurately, for the privilege of using photo-sharing platforms and email clients).
We need a better user experience on the back-end, to be able to vote with our feet and our wallets for privacy-forward open-source companies like Mozilla and their Privacy Not Included initiative. We need to support better journalism, pay journalists that understand this stuff and can boil it down effectively for us, like the New York Times’ Privacy Project. And ultimately, we need to demand action from our lawmakers such as the establishment of a Department of Technology that can understand and react swiftly to crises, passing bills like COPRA, and, as Andrew Yang suggests, treating data as a property right protected under the Fourth Amendment.
The sword that shapes the hand is Big Data. It does not care what you use it for, but it does incentivize the further collection of more data to sharpen itself. This is not a partisan issue. It is one that has already had profound global implications; if we do not decide how to protect this increasingly critical resource and how to use this increasingly powerful tool, those that control it will continue to control us.
