Ensuring Canadians helped, not harmed, by big data
“But I have nothing to hide.” Ask someone whether they’re concerned about entrusting Google or Facebook with their personal data and you’ll often hear this answer. Many Canadians don’t see why it matters if someone else has their information.
Cambridge Analytica has shown us why it matters. Facebook allowed a personality quiz taken by approximately 270,000 people to harvest information from 87 million other Facebook users and Cambridge Analytica leveraged that information for political gain and profit.
The problem is not only that millions of people never clicked a ticky box saying “I consent” — though that is a problem. The problem is not only that privacy policies are long and impenetrable — though that, too, is a problem. The problem is that Cambridge Analytica used people’s information against them.
The ecosystem that’s fuelled the rise of Google and Facebook relies on a simple unwritten promise: they give us services; we give them data; they use that data to benefit both us and them. They might benefit more, but they are not supposed to use our data to harm us.
For example, you might believe Google won’t tell your employer when you search for another job and believe Facebook won’t tell the person you’ve been crushing on how many times you’ve looked at their profile pic. We believe this promise partly because it’s generally in their best interest to keep it: they want to collect more data and they can’t do that if we don’t trust them. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco is just the latest instance of that promise being broken and our trust betrayed.
Canadian governments need to consider the potential for Canadians’ data to do us harm. It’s a bold thing to do, standing in the way of the seemingly inevitable steam train hyperloop of technological progress and trying to steer it onto a better path: but it’s a necessary thing if we are to ensure Canadians share the benefits of big data.
It’s a particularly important question in Toronto where Sidewalk Labs (a Google sister-company) is talking about a massive data-collecting project in the Quayside neighbourhood on the waterfront, predicated on exactly the same kind of promise: we will use your data to make life better. Sidewalk’s vision is tantalizing: lower carbon emissions; cheaper buildings; more jobs, art, investment, prosperity, all at the low cost of our data. Sidewalk will definitely benefit from collecting our data; but will Torontonians? Could Toronto get most of the benefits without giving up our data?
Sidewalk’s vision depends on ubiquitous sensors constantly monitoring Quayside, and analytics to make sense of that data. We don’t know yet what sensors Sidewalk hopes to employ, but they hope to “establish an unparalleled level of trust.”
Sidewalk needs that trust because it can’t practically get consent from every person who happens to walk by for its plan to vacuum up more data than God (or Google) and to use that data to make previously unknown conclusions.
But Sidewalk does not make the same unspoken promise as normal data firms. You’ll see 85 pages into its “Vision Document,” Sidewalk proposes using the data it collects to reward “the most talented, engaged, and valuable participants.”
Sidewalk has not yet revealed what this means, but it should raise alarm bells for anyone who might be ordinarily talented, ordinarily engaged, or ordinarily valuable: you know, normal people.
Sidewalk thus asks us to trust it specially: to trust it to use Torontonians’ data, not to our benefit, but to the benefit of the few people most valuable to Sidewalk. Although we might trust companies to look after individuals out of their corporate best interest, we shouldn’t trust companies to decide what is good for everyone: that’s democracy’s job, as messy and unsatisfying as democracy may be.
At a time when we’re only starting to reckon with the implications of Facebook — a13-year-old company — Toronto should be wary of Sidewalk. Trust us, Sidewalk says. I don’t see why we should.