Data protection and human rights vs data slavery
We are living in a technologically advanced era, the 21st century. In the last hundred years we managed to achieve unbelievable technological progress and have dramatically improved the standard of living as well as our understanding of science, the cosmos and the planet that we inhabit. As well as this, our awareness of basic human rights and moral aspects have improved. It was only a few hundred years ago that human slavery was a common thing and widely accepted. Today, slavery as it was, is banned and forbidden, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10th December 1948 is recognized as the “holy script of human rights” by most of the countries in the world.
As a basic concept of human dignity, liberty, equality and brotherhood, individual rights were established, such as the right to life, prohibition of slavery, universal freedom of speech, thought, opinion, religion, conscience and freedom of movement. Although there are many cases of abuse of these rights, such as human and sex trafficking, child slavery, political and religious rights abuse, most of humankind, at least formally, accepted the basic human rights as fact.
The digital revolution brought internet into our homes, workplaces and mobile devices and it became a basic utility like electricity, water, gas, heating, etc. Transfer of knowledge and information become instant and we established our digital 24/7 presence in the digital world. We have started to leave our digital trail and footprint as we have been interacting through social networks, online shopping, messaging, chatting, searching, and browsing, and have been creating our digital clone on the network. Without realising it, we exposed part of our identity to the network, and unconsciously gave consent to the big internet giants allowing them to harvest our digital souls, for free. So we surrendered and sacrificed our data rights and sovereignty in exchange for convenience and easy access to commodities and digital pleasures. We became digital and data slaves. As with human slaves long ago, when freedom was taken in exchange for food and a place to sleep.
One could say: “So what? I am happy giving up my information, as long as I can continue to enjoy the comfort that all these apps and services are giving me.” Well, that would be wrong. While human slavery was obvious in its cruelty and its creation of suffering, data slavery is even more dangerous due to its hidden and disguised nature: we are giving away our freedom willingly. We’re all the slaves’ owners evil? Not necessarily. Some were family people, respectful members of society, politicians, and governors, with no strong social moral norms about slavery: they were driven by the race for fast growth and economic dominance.
Are the big internet companies evil? Not necessarily. Would these big companies consider the ethical and moral side of harvesting their users’ data and behavior analytics if it slowed their short term growth? Definitely not. Without widely accepted moral norms regarding data sovereignty and data slavery, they will go further and further in exploiting the users and their rights.
If you think that this scenario is not happening today, you are wrong. With the fast development of AI, companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and others are building powerful tools for modeling users’ behavior. From a benign online commerce, the internet services have transformed to an enormous collection of user data for an ever growing and demanding ad market. You are not leaving your digital trail on the net anymore, but your digital clone exists in cyberspace, alone, without any protection, ready to be enslaved.
So how does it work in real life: driven by an enormous appetite for fast growth, the internet giants are creating user behavior models, which can help them predict users’ actions in real life. Furthermore, this is giving them the opportunity to stimulate and alter user behavior in a way that can help them achieve their goals. As with a voodoo doll representing its victim’s body and soul, sticking pins into the doll provokes different actions or causes pain to the victim. The same is happening to you with your digital identity, left in the hands of others. Your digital clone, vulnerable and unprotected, is left to the mercy of the big data traders, allowing them to stick pins in it and provoke your actions in real life in a way that suits them. And if you think that this is fantasy, let us remember the Cambridge Analytica case, influencing Facebook users with political views. Google was recently granted a patent “Predicting users’ needs for a particular context”. Welcome to the Orwell future!
Having this in mind, what can we expect from the future? If we do not act now, then the future does not look bright. If we do not protect our digital-selves, companies that owned big numbers of user behavior models, can, with a press of the button, influence users’ political, social, and commercial tendencies, opinions and actions. What will stop government agencies, political organizations and others using such powerful tools for behavior control so as to swing people’s actions. Who guaranties that western democratic countries would not impose the Chinese way of a Social Credit System for, the so called, “citizen score”. With data slavery at force we are just a step away from a totalitarian society. For those who would say “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” here is a quote from the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, from the 17th century: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”
So, what should we do? The best possible scenario is to extend our legal and human rights to our digital selves. For this to happen, a lot of legislative work and willingness should be applied. And, let us be honest, this is not going to happen overnight. We can not expect that the most involved entities, organisations and companies in data slavery will be interested in changing the status quo. The fight against physical slavery in the past was not started by the slaves’ owners, but by the slaves themselves. It is wrong to expect that government agencies, political players or the big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and others will make changes towards data sovereignty.
No, we, the users have to fight for our rights. And what would those rights be? First of all, data ownership. Every physical person has to be the owner of his personal data. The user’s digital clone has to be under the user’s control. Second is privacy. Every human being should have the right to decide what is private and what is public. Third, the user has to be compensate for the usage of their data. Like with the right of every human being to be paid for his labour, the same should apply for their data. The user should be a participant in the data market with their own data. With the future unemployment wave that will be caused by automation and AI advanced algorithms, taking part in a data market orientated economy, with your own data, could serve as an addition to the announced Universal Basic Income.
How can we achieve these goals? We cannot change the existing business practice of big tech companies. The way they are running data business is too cumbersome and outdated. We have to build a new model from scratch, which will make the existing one old-fashioned and obsolete. Fortunately, we have powerful tools like block chain and smart contracts. Many creative and openminded individuals are working hard to bring forward a new decentralized, block chain and a smart contract driven applications. We have to switch from Facebook, Google, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram and others to decentralized applications that can guaranty data protection and privacy. One of the great movements for data ownership and privacy is Suntoken.io.
We have to wake up and start fighting against data slavery.
