Companies shouldn’t surveil us and neither should the government
Surveillance by corporation or surveillance by state — there’s a difference.
I know it may sound arbitrary to some. Maybe obvious to others? Regardless of where you fall, I’ve had several exchanges over the past weeks that conflated the two so I wanted to delve in and explain why we need to aggressively distinguish surveillance by corporations from surveillance by governments. And vice versa.
The corona-virus pandemic has prompted a cornucopia of tracking and tracing technologies developed by private entities for governments. Some are better at protecting the privacy and security of individuals, some are worse. The worse solutions are those that use mobile location/wifi tracking and apply no obfuscation (also known as “data masking” — a process which hides personally identifiable information) essentially leaving identifiable individual-level information sitting around in a database. The better privacy solutions track proximity to other individuals rather than location (through Bluetooth rather than GPS/mobile network towers) and obfuscate the individual-level data.
If you’re curious about the technical details of those options, there are far better resources than I on the subject.
The issue is that with either category, we are creating channels for surveillance. In the case of Bluetooth based proximity tracking, a new capability is being built into the API, the backbone, of our devices. And at the moment, these new functionalities are being built to protect us and return life back to normal. Yay! But few governments or companies have iterated a time limit for these ‘temporary’ measures and that leaves me with a bitter taste. There is absolutely nothing guaranteeing that this will all go away; actually we have a rather damning historical record of the contrary. No legislative order promising that we will un-invent the systems we’ve put into place, that we will roll back the functionalities we have enabled on everyone’s phone. Right now Bluetooth turns off when it runs on a background app (to save battery and protect your privacy), if we are removing that temporarily (which is where the Google and Apple API are headed), who is guaranteeing that we will return to privacy status quo?
The potential outcome is that these functionalities remain with governments for decades to come under one justification or another. As always, the reasoning will be one of several boogeyman — be it terrorism or child exploitation. And I’m not saying those are not severe issues, just that there is no evidence to suggest that living in a surveillance police state would truly protect us from society’s darkest urges.
So something like Bluetooth running in the background establishing a daily log of how long your interactions were with a series of other individuals sounds like a pretty sh*t idea for repressive governments to have. Or for intelligence agencies to have for the next decade. Which is why, in particular, companies that are normally focused on law enforcement and military intelligence contracts should absolutely not be commissioned to assist with the development of public health apps. You cannot keep that conflict of interest separate, don’t even try me.
I digress.
“But aren’t you worried about surveillance by tech companies more? Isn’t the government the trusted actor in a scenery of surveillance?”
No. This is a false choice and I choose to worry about both private and government surveillance EQUALLY. You should too! Don’t let this whataboutism tell you otherwise.
It is absolutely true that surveillance capitalism (a catchy term for social media and all online tracking/data collecting entities) is harmful, but I worry more about governments who see it as an opportunity to piggyback on the capabilities these companies have to surveil us rather than stepping in and properly regulating the collection practices of these services. Because that is the primary role of governments — to protect our rights and liberty.
Where did governments get the impression they can be so derelict in their duty to protect our rights and freedoms?
If you follow this sort of space, you will know that even the European Union who is considered to have the world’s ‘toughest’ stance on data protection (GDPR!) and privacy, only won its battles to pass that legislation by a narrow margin. A narrow margin that was tested for years by hundreds of industry lobbyists appealing to politicians who are gaming for a re-election, far too afraid to take a stand. “What if it harms innovation?” echoes through the halls of EU institutions and I can only imagine that it will be the unfunny byline of future’s histories.
Let me get back to my point. Yes, corporate surveillance has run amok and causes real threats to the safety and security of individuals. However, private companies operate under a different social license. There is an understanding that they operate within the law, otherwise we can take legal action. Law set by the government, written by government, enforced by government.
Sounds reasonable? Did you know that under Australia’s anti-encryption legislation (known as TOLA) they have actually removed the individual’s right to sue the private entity for a violation of privacy? They did this solely to ensure cooperation by private companies with government requests for communications data.
Governments have gotten completely derailed in the conversation of surveillance. They see everything that surveillance capitalism has built as an opportunity to enrich their own power rather than a threat to the people — a true failure of both our institutional frameworks as well as our own power to hold them to account. Governments need to protect us, and they need to start from the inside out if we are going to have a shot at existing in a free, open and democratic society in the future.
If I can ask one thing of all of us, it is to not give into the fear. Don’t let boogeyman and big scary things push you into thinking that sacrificing and inch of the privacy and liberty we are all owed is worth it. There are always other options. Wars have been fought to give us the lives we have, the onus is on us to remember their legacy enough to avoid falling into the same trappings.
9/11 gave us the most invasive surveillance regimes in history and they linger around to this day. In fact, they will linger indefinitely. The reality is that their fight is never over because surveillance exists to fight concepts, dark things that exist in society. It is a tool of power for those in power and it’s a real tragedy when the institutions which should protect our rights are frittering them away.
