Involuntarily given data hauls and the rights of the individual citizen
Facebook stands accused of being party to a huge data theft affecting millions of its users, for commercial and political usage.
An app called this is your digita llife, developed by the firm Cambridge Analytica, offered a personality test which users could take. The app took not only data from users but from their friends too, meaning that 160,000 users lead to a data leak involving 50 million profiles. Facebook, it is claimed, was aware of this as long ago as 2015, even after testifying to a UK parliamentary enquiry just last month that Cambridge Analytica “may have lots of data but it will not be Facebook user data.” Cambridge Analytica also worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign on data analytics, raising suspicions of illegal influence in both votes.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized after the firm tried to stonewall the allegation, again claiming that privacy is fundamental to how Facebook operates. He said, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” and followed this up with full-page ads in newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times and Observer.
But this further instance of data leakage – following a similar incident in 2013 involving 6 million users – seems to suggest a structural problem. Are people putting too much data concerning their lives in the hands of a largely unaccountable institution? And if so, why are they so willing to do so?
The rise of social media sites is probably the story of the decade. Let’s consider how they operate. The psychological model social media utilizes is virtually irresistible. We all crave to hear what our closest friends are saying. The industry calls it “FOMO,” or the fear of missing out. We are thus encouraged on Facebook to give every detail about ourselves: location, education, work history, friends, likes and dislikes, and life events.
By analyzing what people share and like, the data can reveal the kind of person you are – how you might vote, your consumer preferences, your sexual orientation, even your intelligence. And should you delete that information, Facebook will send constant nagging reminders to “update” it “so people can learn more about you.” Because you want people to get to know you, right? Because your history is important to those around you – and because this information can lead advertisers to target you with astonishing granularity.
And there’s the critical fact that our receptivity to information is at its highest either when searching for it or when those we trust impart it – and who is more trusted than our network of friends and family? So we are more readily open to the news items they share.
News sharing thus became a crucial component of social media sites, particularly Facebook.
To put it in context: until quite recently, the news networks and newspapers were the authoritative sources of the news of the day. But the times have changed, with social media now frequently where people get their news. Newspaper circulations in the UK, for instance, have declined precipitously, from 13.5 million a day on average in 2000 to just over 8 million in 2018. Meanwhile Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, Tumblr and Snapchat, have risen in just a few years as rival sources of news. Some 62 percent of American adults in 2016 got news from social media and 18 percent did so “often.” That means 60 million people were doing so often, when Trump won the presidential election by 700,000 well-placed votes.
Social media’s business model is only legitimate if users can know and consent to what is being done to their data. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Facebook and all the others do not always make clear how the data is used, and their means of data harvesting isn’t always voluntary. Chat apps require use of the microphone on your smartphone – naturally, because how else could you do a voice or video call?
But they listen in when not in use. Recently I had been reading Roald Dahl’s The BFG to my daughter. The next day, when I went onto YouTube, the audiobook of another Roald Dahl novel was at the top of the “Recommended Videos” section.
I had never looked up Roald Dahl or any of his books on the internet. Clearly something was listening in and “promoting” things on the basis of my user data.
This monitoring and profiting from user data has been called surveillance capitalism. And as with any kind of surveillance, it places an enormous amount of data in the hands of institutions that are largely unaccountable. This data is a huge source of power, because, as we’ve seen, it can tell a great deal about you. This raises the question of the legitimacy of its use and acquisition.
Involuntarily given data of whatever provenance claimed by any institution cedes far too much power to them. It’s not just that there’s a heightened risk of leakage. Data is power. Those who acquire data have been allowed to do so unhindered because the consequences of their actions were not clear. Now they are, and we all have to decide whether the surveillance is worth it.