Surveillance Feudalism
There’s currently a schism forming between Europes GDPR and the standard practices of countries like China. This has led companies like google to attempt to develop alternative software for alternative politics, such as the search engine Dragonfly.
This failed as geopolitical pressure forced google to not enable what the western world deemed “totalitarian and Orwellian intentions.” Separate laws regarding the collection of data will inevitably lead to different collections of that data, in scope and in type. This, in turn, will lead to increasingly proprietary definitions of these archives of our personal information. Stasis is difficult. Economically, and frankly Darwinianly speaking, the norm is either expansion or contraction. If we are not expanding global access to everyone’s personal data, we will likely experience the demand for privacy at an institutional level, if not a personal one.
What this means for designers and developers is a demand for the tools to allow for or circumvent differences in these laws, such as navigation software that doesn’t use GPS.
Imagine a digital map of an entire city that, having set an accurate origin point, managed to track your location via how far your phone has traveled from that origin point using a modified acceleromater rather than tracking your location via gps. This program could allow you to navigate anywhere, and while the phone would update it’s city maps, your personal location would be entirely private. Or at least, a secret between you and the company that ran the app.
This is an explicit move towards privacy, but there will likely be more subtle versions.
Social media may design it’s rules for communication and search to avoid the ability for third parties to track certain information on their platforms if the publisher/public forum distinction becomes blurred, for example.
We know this is coming. What can we do to prepare ourselves for the transition?
