What would you do if a company offered to install a free soda machine in your house? Unlimited soda every hour of every day, never costing you a dime. Sounds pretty cool, right? They don’t even ask for a credit card or any form of payment, they just install it and walk away. Too good to be true? What’s the worst that could happen?
Years later, you find out it had a hidden camera and was live streaming the whole time to paying customers, and that’s how the free soda machine paid for itself many times over. Not for you, for the company.
That’s basically Facebook in a nutshell.
Now that people have become aware of the downside of free soda machines, they’ve decided to rebrand themselves and offer free houses instead. Hey, if it worked for Philip Morris, why not Facebook?
Privacy entered popular awareness when Edward Snowden revealed the illegal and still(!) ongoing mass surveillance program by the NSA. As anyone who has seen Social Dilemma knows, we now live in a society where our every move, on and offline, are being monitored and recorded by both corporations and governments. What was unthinkable a mere decade ago has become our reality, seemingly overnight.
But what’s the big deal? Who cares if companies are tracking your every move online and offline?
Most of us have no use for other people’s browsing history or their locations throughout the day. Which is why we don’t see a problem with companies like Facebook harvesting our personal data, especially when the harvesting is done clandestinely under the guise of “free” services.
Privacy is an abstract concept, which makes it difficult to quantify exactly what we lose when companies invade our privacy, which makes it difficult for us to care enough to push back.
It may be helpful to think about this issue through the frame of power. Because at the core, this fight is not about data, it’s about power.
It’s about who has access to your personal information and therefore the power to use that information against you.
Meet Big Brother - a fictional character in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He lives in the modern realms as well.
Claim your power
It’s not just about serving you better ads, that’s just one way they can use the information. It’s the ability to target you personally, based on years of analyzing your every move, not just your browsing history. It’s your likes and dislikes, how long you linger on different types of content, how likely you are to react, your location throughout the day, who you interact with, both online and offline, and that’s just what we know about.
Combined with machine learning, all this raw information about you grants corporations the power to target you with whatever information the highest bidder wants. If the highest bidder happens to want to sow division and chaos in society for whatever reason, that’s what will be paid for and delivered on a massive scale. There are reasons to believe this has already happened, and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future.
Corporations like Facebook and government agencies like the NSA have detailed records of our daily routine, but we know nothing about their internal workings, nor are they accountable to us. Such power imbalance enables and inevitably leads to tyranny and abuse. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is true for individuals, and it is true for corporations and governments which are run by individuals.
So what’s the solution, besides buying an iPhone? Unfortunately, while the ability to opt out of tracking has given us back a measure of privacy, there’s nothing Apple can do to prevent your carrier tracking your location and monitoring your calls, to say nothing of weapons grade spyware courtesy of our very own NSA.
We as digital consumers can take steps towards achieving digital transparency and privacy
Yes, there are steps we can take to protect our privacy. But I believe this is not a problem that can be solved with better encryption. Facebook has shown time and again that they believe privacy is largely a matter of managing public perception and will not fundamentally change the way they do business. Therefore the only way to compel them is through legislation.
We can not be free offline if we are not free online, not anymore.
If we cannot stop mass surveillance and tracking, then we need to insist on transparency. We need to insist on corporations being completely transparent on what’s being done with our data and how it’s being used. We need real time access to the data stored about us, with the right to permanently delete any and all of it. Last but not least, we need to be compensated for a share of the profit generated from our data.
As more and more of our lives are moving online in the post-Covid world, it is long past time that we demand nothing less than the complete ownership of our digital lives.
Let’s claim our power.