When Is a Data User a Data Citizen?
You will not be Watched
In the film Jason Bourne (2016) tech big shot Aaron Kalloor has created Deep Dream, a sinister social media platform with the capacity to capture data from millions of citizens. After announcing to a media audience ‘you will not be watched’ in response to a query about the security of personal data Kalloor meets up with CIA director Robert Dewey in a dingy restaurant. The two argue over the merits of internet freedom versus surveillance and agree to hold a debate about privacy rights. Dodgy Dewey’s real aim though is to acquire data from Deep Dream for his global surveillance purposes. Kalloor seems to agree but later Dewey senses he is unsure and orders his assassination.
Data Capital
Forward to 2020 and in a world being shaped by the growing powers of Data Capital citizens are more concerned than ever about data security and clandestine surveillance. This is not a film or a fantasy. In five years Data Capital will be served by swelling numbers of online workers. According to an Oxford Economics report authored by William Xu:
By 2025 the industrial internet is predicted to experience massive growth, with industries across the board seeking high levels of digitisation and intelligence. By then we expect the digital economy to grow further, to 23.4 percent of global GDP.
The 23.4 percent figure was predicted before the Covid-19 pandemic which many believe will retard global growth for years to come. However, there are signs the digital economy might grow faster than predicted as workers and consumers respond to lockdowns by using digital tools and working at home. Consumer driven Big tech have seen their revenues soar despite Covid-19. Pandemic proof Amazon increased its profits in the 2nd quarter this year as did other eCommerce platforms. Small tech is making it big like the video conferencing platform Zoom.
Working at home may be new for many but there is nothing new about home based working. The online labour market employed large numbers of home based workers willing to work around the clock for paltry wages long before the pandemic. Now such workers will compete with new arrivals for micro pay and promotion. Data Capital is set to grow, and grow, along with the relentless surveillance and monitoring of digital labour performances by increasingly sophisticated algorithms. Did Jason Bourne feature the many online workers employed to service the Deep Dream platform, and the unpaid cultural workers and online volunteers who continue to contribute to the development of the internet? In 2003 Tiziana Terranova noted:
The Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labour intensive.
Data Regulations
The Covid-19 pandemic has not only benefited consumer tech it is also accelerating the development of bio-security measures such as the tracking of medical information from mobile devices. Smart phones can record details of infections from other mobile devices. Drones, robots and other Artificial Intelligent machines are being programmed to detect Covid-19, monitor the infected and survey the well. Two private sector tech giants, Google and Apple, have been developing contact tracing systems. Their exposure and notification systems are now integrated into the Android and iOS operating systems. Meanwhile, the UK’s government app is still being tested. Or perhaps splash! at the bottom of the Channel!
However, these developments are not always accompanied by new data regulations and laws. The priority of governments right now is to control the health emergency until a vaccine is available yet due to Covid-19 exigencies the accumulation, aggregation and storage of data by capital is accelerating faster than legislators can pass statutory data laws. UNCTAD reported in 2019, well before the pandemic, that ‘Policies and regulations have not kept up with rapid digital transformations’. We can assume the gap is widening even as we read and write. Meanwhile Oracle bellows:
‘Data creates Value!’
‘Algorithms are the secret weapon of data-driven competition!’
If algorithms are the ‘secret weapon’ who is the enemy?
And it is not only in developing economies data laws lag behind digital developments. For example, US citizens rely upon an assortment of privacy and consumer regulations at both the Federal and State levels. There is no General Data Protection Regulation in the US that matches the EU GDPR introduced in 2018 and the UK equivalent. There are sector specific privacy laws, Finance and Health, etc, and consumer protection laws administered by the Federal Trade Commission. California does have an online Privacy Protection Act CalOPPA which applies to ‘any website located in the state’. A federal bill was introduced by Maria Cantwell in 2019 which has yet to reach the Senate: Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, COPRA . It requests ‘the FTC establish a new bureau to enforce the provisions’. The State of Washington takes the biscuit with a Privacy Act that failed to pass twice! Fail again. Fail better. And to top it all: the European Union Court of Justice has ‘invalidated’ the ‘Privacy Shield’ that allowed the free transfer of data between the EU and US, because: ‘US law fails to adequately protect EU personal data’.
Given the US is home to big tech: Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, etc, the snail pace progress in the area of general data legislation is puzzling especially in the light of so many ‘cyber security breaches’. David Ruiz writes:
Never-ending cyber security breaches, recently enacted privacy laws, public outrage, and crisis after crisis from the world’s largest social media company have pushed US senators and representatives into rarely charted territory: regulation.
The litany of data breaches by the world’s largest social media company, Facebook, is eye-watering. 10 years before the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal in which 50 million FB account holders had their profiles stolen and sold for 1 million dollars, the social media company was accessing net-workers’ data on other websites. In 2019 net-workers had their email contacts uploaded without their consent. And the malefactions continued. Phones with WhatsApp -bought by FB in 2018- were infected with spyware including the phone of Roger Torrent, a Catalonian politician. Clearly FB’s record is dire. Such business practices reveal contempt for FB’s 2.4 billion net-workers; but then as Karin Pettersson points out tech giants like FB, Amazon and Apple are not interested in ‘helping’ data generators. ‘They are looking to maximise profit and market share’.
Data Fetishism
Pettersson continues by saying the tech giants ‘will happily comply with national labour laws’ providing they can harvest data for free. Where did this bucolic fantasy come from? US based tech giants like Facebook are global capitalist enterprises; businesses that have the means to evade the labour laws of other jurisdictions. Their wealth accumulates, wild west style, like those cattle ranchers in Johnson County who in 1889 fought homesteaders for access to water and the open range. In England, the enclosure of the commons was regulated by Parliamentary Enclosure Acts. Thus landowners became a class with the powers to evict the landless: widows, unmarried women and the disabled among them. Capital accumulation has often been a violent process involving appropriation and dispossession.
Last year Uber drivers took legal action to gain access to data held by the company. As Uber failed to provide the performance and profile data the drivers, supported by their unions: App Drivers, Couriers Union, International Alliance of Transport Workers and others, will argue in a court in Amsterdam that Uber has violated the General Data Protection Regulation.
Azeem Hanif said: Drivers must have full transparency over algorithmic management and complete access to the data so they can build real collective bargaining power in their union.
Comprehensive data protection laws allow citizens as workers and individuals to challenge companies who breach the regulations. Such workers, too often bundled together as ‘data users’ with no distinct identity as networking citizens, are also volunteers, patients, parents, welfare recipients, union members, producers of cultural goods, disabled net-workers and so on. Collectively they produce ‘value’ for capital. Each email datum is a labour product, even if its production takes a fraction of a second. According to Pettersson however:
An increasing share of the value in today’s economy does not emanate from labour but from the data extracted from human activity.
We heard something similar when Oracle bellowed: ‘Data Creates Value’! In whose interest is it to exclude labour from the production of value? Why Data Capital of course! The words of Tiziana Terranova beg to differ from this chorus praising the glory of data. ‘The Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work,’. and that work is: ‘extremely labour intensive’. So the production of value requires workers, organised, disciplined and stratified. If ‘value’ did magically emanate from data taken from ‘human activity’ we would not need capital, the labour market and regular wages. We could return to painting caves and inscribing papyri. To represent data as creating value like this is to camouflage the nexus of relations between capital and labour that energise digitisation. This fetishism of data is the opposite of transparency. It obscures and disguises by attributing intrinsic powers to data independent of actual labour processes. Is it any wonder that those once infatuated by digital developments get upset when the fetishism is revealed to be a fiction? For example when data dependent algorithms reproduce the prejudices of an unfair and unjust social order?
With lives rapidly transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic politicians and policy makers need to be wary of the ways in which digital developments can be represented in terms that exclude labour. It’s no coincidence that films like the Zombie movies feature alienated characters who are nameless, jobless and homeless. We meet them in Soylent Green, disorganised and hungry, unaware they are being harvested for food by Soylent Industries; a huge global company that controls half the world’s food supply. Is this our future? Will we become data Zombies feeding big tech?
