Big Tech is the Modern Day Big Brother
The other day I was sitting with friends speaking about the website Dormify. A very random topic for seniors in college who have not lived in a dorm for a few years and who will probably never again. A few hours later I was on my computer and an advertisement popped up for Dormify. Instantly I had an uncanny feeling that the internet was listening to the conversation I had just been having. Why else would this advertisement come up when it does not match my consumer profile. Have you ever gotten an advertisement for something you had just been talking or thinking about? Experiences like this have become so common and accepted in society with big tech pointing to these instances as “personalization,” which is frankly bullshit. Big tech masks the manipulation of users as personalization, creating an illusion of transparency but in reality eroding human autonomy when it comes to social, political, and economic decision making.
First, who is big tech and what is personalization? Big tech is the most prosperous technology companies in today’s marketplace — Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, often referred to as the Big Five (Flynn, 2021). Not only did big tech revenues reach $1.4 trillion in 2021, but they are growing rapidly. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft collectively increased their profit more than 55% in 2021 (Owens, 2022). Most people interact with one or more of these platforms every day. I for one probably use all five every single day. Now onto personalization. Personalization is the act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual (salesforce). Similar to how your friends and family tailor the gifts they give you based on your preferences, hobbies, and interests, big tech tailors your online experiences based on information they know about you. For example, if you are vegan and love to exercise, platforms will likely serve ads for healthy foods or lifestyle products. So how does big tech know this personal information about you? You’re giving it to them for free! Yes you are giving them the data used to manipulate your decision making at no cost to them.
“If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.” — Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist
This notion highlights the idea that seemingly “free” services such as Google, Facebook, and many other social media platforms, you as a user are giving your attention and data as payment. Big tech corporations every day are collecting enormous amounts of data about the behavior of users enabling them to create personalized experiences. These corporations then sell this data about users to advertising third parties. This act of monitoring and logging your Internet traffic by a third party is called online surveillance and it is growing rapidly (templar) In 2012, the American data broker industry generated $156 billion in revenue exceeding twice the amount the US government allocated to its whole intelligence budget (Hendricks, V. F 2019). The global data broker market is expected to reach $345 billion in 2026 (global report). Facebook states that “we want our advertising to be as relevant and interesting as the other information you find on our Services” which creates the illusion that they are thinking about benefiting the user (Hendricks, V. F 2019). But we all know when you look past this rose colored lens perspective, corporations like Facebook profit by selling user data through a business model that is based on surveillance. This “personalization” has decreased our autonomy over the social, political, and economic decisions we make every day.
Big tech knows more about you than you do
Many people think that big tech only knows surface level information about us like what you like to do in your free time and where you like to shop. However, in reality, companies can predict thoughts you’ve never spoken or information you don’t even know about yourself yet. This became evident when the company Target was able to predict whether a woman was pregnant in the hopes that they would use targeting advertising to capture them early and then have them as lifelong customers. In one instance, a 17 year old girl was shown a targeted pregnancy ad, her father complained over the phone about showing such a young girl this advertisement. However, the data was right, Target knew before this girl that she was pregnant (Hill, K. 2016). This one instance shows the power of big data and the extent to which they know everything about us, however it doesn’t stop there. Target was planning to use this information about the girl being pregnant to target her with ads and persuade her to shop at Target for baby products in the hopes of her becoming a lifetime customer. This is one of many examples of how data can be used to influence or predict your political beliefs, sexual orientation, and many other very personal pieces of information.
A study published in the journal “Big Data” found that based off of as little as three likes on Facebook, an ad campaign can make inferences about a user’s sexual orientation. This holds true even when users intentionally withhold their sexual orientation. In 2012, two students at the University of Texas Austin were inadvertently outed to their friends and family when Facebook added them to a public Facebook group for members of the university’s LGBTQ chorus (Armus 2017). The decision to tell their friends and family about their sexual orientation was taken away from them. Coming out to family can be very scary for some and the decision to take such a vulnerable step should have been in the hands of these students, not Facebook. This instance not only is an invasion of their privacy and personal information, but it also illustrates how big tech can take away a user’s autonomy over their social decisions.
Voice of the people or powerful tech?
In the 2016 US Presidential election, the Trump campaign hired the firm Cambridge Analytica, a company that used data to “change audience behavior” in political and commercial advertising. The firm scraped personal information of about 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or content and then used this data to influence users’ decisions when it came to the election (Hendricks, V. F 2019). For example, a former advisor of President Trump Steve Bannon both before and after the election directed the firm to conduct research on suppressing Black voters. Whistleblower Chrisopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica parent-company SCL, testified that the company targeted Black Americans with “voter disengagement” methods (Burns 2018). The ability for this firm to not only gather personal information about millions of Facebook users as well as use this knowledge to target and manipulate voters reveals the extreme power and danger of surveillance. The presidential election is a defining process for America and symbolizes the freedom of the people to choose their leader. Manipulating people through exposure to certain content in the effort to change their decision making and actions is a direct threat to human autonomy and in this case a threat to our political system.
Big tech political influence is not restricted to the United States or even first world countries as a matter of fact. Facebook and other social media platforms have been used to fuel anger, tensions, and divisions to benefit a certain group around the world. This tactic was seen in Kenya when “extremely divisive political messaging and targeted misinformation packages” were seen in the 2017 election (Hendricks, V. F 2019). Fake news articles were created to look like reports from the BBC and CNN in an attempt to sway voters and were then advertised on Facebook (Said-Moorhouse, 2017). Inciting violence in a country with high ethnic tensions created political violence and great risk to the well being of the country.
Both of these examples, in the United States and in Kenya, demonstrate the power of big tech to manipulate the decisions of voters. Citizens of both countries who were exposed to this tailored content or misinformation were likely unaware of the impact the information was having on their decision to vote for one candidate over the other. It is not only sad to see the spread of violence and anger at the hands of billion dollar companies who see people as money signs, but it is unnerving to see the decisions of voters being manipulated.
Profit making persuasion masked as personalization
The idea that data has value leads to the concept of surveillance capitalism, the process of profiting from surveilling citizens or consumers. As further described by Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, surveillance capitalism is an economic system centered around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making (Zuboff, S, 2020). Surveillance capitalism surfaced in 2001 during an era focused on the superiority of self-regulating companies and markets. Additionally, it arose around the time of one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history 9/11 (Laidler, J, 2019). Filled with outrage and fear, state authorities turned to big tech to learn more about how the attack originated as well as developing surveillance to prevent another catastrophe. The need for government surveillance for public safety created a common interest between big tech and the government. In order to have digital surveillance at scale, the government had to infiltrate the digital environment deeply and constantly. While the intention of this surveillance was to keep Americans safe, the privacy exceptions and lack of regulation of surveillance laid the groundwork for instances of surveillance capitalism decreasing human autonomy.
As stated by Zuboff, surveillance capitalism “is celebrated as ‘personalization,’ although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal” (Zuboff, S., 2020). Facebook and other big tech companies have tried to make it seem like they use data in order to show the most relevant information to users therefore benefiting the user. Many people see this argument as legitimate because some sort of filtering is necessary with so much information out there. As a young college student, I do not need to be seeing advertisements about retirement homes. However, the data is not being used innocently to help users, it has been used to target the vulnerable. For example, if you are a struggling parent trying to put your children through college, you get offers for loans at extremely high interest rates. In such a vulnerable state you are more likely to fall for this advertisement, therefore making a poor economic decision while the billion dollar business Facebook is profiting (Hendricks, V. F 2019). This is one of many ways Facebook preys on the vulnerable in order to make a profit. The more Facebook knows about you, the more they profit. The more they profit, the more they want to know about you. To learn more, surveillance increases, creating a vicious cycle of big tech making billions at the expense of our privacy and autonomy. The big tech giants have attempted to place a veil over this economic system and mask its grave implications on human autonomy as “personalization.”
Big tech has become the modern day big brother. “Personalization” is bullshit. Big tech surveillance is eating away at our privacy and control over our social, political, and economic decisions. I don’t know about you but I for one would not like to be the student from UT Austin, the manipulated voters, or any of the people mentioned above who’s decision making autonomy was taken away from them. But who knows I probably am and don’t even realize it. Now that’s scary.
