It’s Not That We’ve Failed to Rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve Not Even Tried.
The tech giants use our data not only to predict our behaviour but to change it. But we can resist this attack on democracy.
By Shoshana Zuboff
In a BBC interview last week, Facebook’s vice-president, Nick Clegg, surprised viewers by calling for new “rules of the road” on privacy, data collection and other company practices that have attracted heavy criticism during the past year. “It’s not for private companies … to come up with those rules,” he insisted. “It is for democratic politicians in the democratic world to do so.”
Facebook’s response would be to adopt a “mature role”, not “shunning” but “advocating” the new rules. For a company that has fiercely resisted new laws, Clegg’s message aimed to persuade us that the page had turned. Yet his remarks sounded like Newspeak, as if to obscure ugly facts.
A few weeks earlier Facebook’s chiefs, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, snubbed a subpoena from the Canadian parliament to appear for questioning. Clegg then showcased Silicon Valley’s standard defence against the rule of law — warning that any restrictions resulting from “tech-lash” risked making it “almost impossible for tech to innovate properly”…
