The Data Class-Divide
In the premillennial decades, optimistic scholars and sci-fi writers alike wrote about the potential for the internet to be a “Great Equaliser” — a digital utopia without many of the economic barriers of the analog eras. It’s certainly undeniable that the internet has brought about a global democratisation of information and communication. But in 2019 you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who still thought of it as a utopian destination for society. The internet is much more like a mirror, with the socioeconomic challenges that exist in our daily lives often coexisting in cyberspace.
Online or off, privacy has always had a considerable relationship with one’s economic position in society. Experiencing financial disadvantage often requires the disclosure of greater amounts of personal information to a greater number of public and private parties to receive support. Lack of personal access to your own internet connection on your own device increases the likelihood that you’ll forfeit your browsing anonymity at a library desktop or within an open WIFI-network. Even which mobile phone you can afford may have lasting impacts on your experience of privacy — take the BLU R1 HD, the $60USD best-selling mobile handset that allegedly contained spyware backdoors to Chinese servers.
While many of these civic and consumer choices are our own, responding with a rigid “buyer-beware” response would be misplaced. When our decisions around data sharing are deliberate or wilfully frivolous, we may have to wear their burden. But when disclosures are necessitated by economic position or compelled by legal regulation, our conversations around them need to acknowledge how privilege plays out in privacy.
Take the pay-for-privacy economy for example, which as its very basis puts a price tag on one’s ability to browse, network and transact in relative privacy. The unchecked growth of this model will produce wider divides between the privacy haves and have-nots. It may also lead to changed operating conditions for advertisers who will be communicating to increasingly distorted and financially hegemonic demographics (so, is it even worth it?).
Data as a driver
A cruel irony of the data class-divide exists in how the data collected from privacy-poor individuals will often directly feed another’s financial gain. Despite the emergence of consumer data-rights around the world, data is by and large treated as capital, not labour. We generate commercially valuable data around-the clock, and yet are seldom given a seat at the table regarding what happens to it, let alone a share of the financial returns. Microsoft Research’s Glen Weyl and Co highlighted through their 2017 paper that:
“It matters how we as a society think and talk about user-generated data as an input to production, such as treating labor differently than capital. There is a certain sense of respectability and meaning that comes from our labor…”
Treating data as labour is a controversial and complex discussion (beyond this article’s scope!) however it’s certainly one worth having going forward given how problematic the relationship between data and power is already. Cambridge Analytica showed us how the covert capture and capitalisation of personal data in this internet-age has the potential to alter elections. But what if it is also changing something less grandiose, such as how people navigate financial distress?
Not unlike traditional credit-reporting, data-driven services now offer visibility over an individual’s online profile and activities. Tenant screening firms such as Naborly analyse numerous data-points from prospective renters, including their social media activity, to provide risk profiles to landlords. This is not only alarming for over-sharers tweeting their financial woes, but for anyone with a digital profile. These systems overestimate the reliability and accuracy of digital footprints, and yet can impact attempts to find housing, employment, insurance and generally engage in economic mobility.
Attitude as an avenue
Arguing that such trends merely reflect developments in a competitive market also ignores the power imbalance that such business models capitalise on. Studies show that many of us feel a lack of control over our digital footprints, and that this is only exaggerated when factors of youth and low-socioeconomic status are brought into the mix. The more data sharing one engages in, the more gargantuan the task seems of ever reigning things in. This outlook of inevitability is exploited by organisations in much the same way as they benefit from the broader framing of privacy as solely an individual responsibility to dodge their own privacy protection mandate.
Handling data as capital without an eye on its humanity also has the potential to skew societal attitudes towards privacy as a human right. As a key enabler of self-determination, free expression, fair access to services, and even freedom of movement and physical safety, can we afford for conceptions of privacy to be eroded by the data-driven economy?
Some may argue that the ship has sailed — yet there still may be opportunities to embed new values that directly respond to the realities of a post-privacy world. Even if done reluctantly, leaving the “Great Equaliser” vision in the past might be a good place to start.
