Democracy is not ready for age of big tech

Facebook’s financial woes should not offer comfort. What’s coming next could be much more alarming

Whoosh. There goes £100 billion (Dh477.4 billion). With one mighty slosh in the frothing sea of international markets, Facebook stock lost a fifth of its value in a few hours last week, making for the biggest US stock-market loss ever seen in a single day. It’s not been the best year for the tech giant. It has been panned by politicians and activists for allowing its platform to become a propaganda arm for malign forces from Russia to Daesh (the selfproclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), for funnelling user data into unscrupulous hands and for driving us all crazy with social media addiction. Its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been hauled in to testify at length before the US Congress, and has riled European political opposition by his derisive refusal to do the same here.

The need to police his enormous website is starting to cost Zuckerberg more money. But more importantly, users seem to be getting a bit bored with it. In the developed world, the number of its users is getting to saturation point. Facebook is still a ginormous beast, of course, reaching 2.2 billion people and counting each month, but investors have realised the breakneck expansion pace can’t continue. It’s easy to get fixated on the misdeeds of a particular company and cheer its misfortunes. Facebook is hard to like. But the truth is that we are just at the start of the data age it represents.

Take the EU’s first major data regulation, GDPR. Most of us will know it only from the flurry of emails we all received a few months ago, asking us to sign back up to company email lists. These emails were, incidentally, not actually required by the legislation, but few businesses seemed able to discern what it did require. That’s because GDPR is an analogue regulation for a digital world. It tries to establish the right principles, but modern tech is a slippery beast and our current regulatory methods certainly aren’t up to the task of policing it. One small example illustrates why. GDPR tries to enhance users’ rights over personal data rather than deeming it the sole property of the organisation that collects it. So one of its provisions is that, if a person demands it, a company must delete the personal data it holds on her. This sounds simple, but it isn’t.

“Delete” isn’t a binary term in IT. It could mean anything from making the data unavailable and hard to access, writing over it eight times, or shredding the physical disc on which it’s stored. It’s also extremely difficult for a company to be sure it’s managed to “delete” every copy it might have. In other words, this very reasonable-sounding law is extremely difficult to obey and almost certainly unenforceable.

Murky accountability

Then there’s the problem of jurisdiction. Increasingly, data is being stored on the cloud- networked servers that users can access from anywhere. Governments increasingly want to know and make laws on where the data is stored so that they can apply rules to it on usage or access by law enforcement. Unfortunately for them, within a cloud, data moves around political jurisdictions seamlessly and unnoticeably. It can be in several places at once or might appear to be unavailable when in fact it still exists somewhere. Unfortunately, history teaches that liberating technology always uncovers the evil alongside the good and creative in humanity. Extremist ideologies can flow across the world just as easily as new sewing designs. Making criminals and states accountable for their actions is becoming increasingly murky and difficult.

Even more alarming is the prospect of how this will transform governments. It’s entirely possible that in the future, the only way for governments to exercise the normal functions of a state that we now take for granted will be to build centralised, authoritarian databases and surveillance mechanisms. The archetype for this is, of course, China. Beijing is the only modern authority able to police the internet. It deploys a variety of tools, from making online anonymity illegal to cutting itself off from all external influences and introducing a new “social credit” system, in which every online user is rated depending on various behaviours, such as the prompt repayment of debts, the number of hours they spend playing computer games or the “quality” of their social media posts.

Compared with this nightmarish vision, Facebook looks almost benign. It isn’t, of course, but nor is it clear what exactly we can do about its most malignant aspects without radically altering our attitude to privacy, freedom and state power. Democratic, liberal values and the nation state have been sorely tested many times in their history. But the coming tech age might be their biggest test yet.