I want invite you to read something really interesting that will likely change how you think about Digital Policy and Governance.
I’ve been spending time given some thought to issues of privacy for accessing the internet and digital platforms. I’ve come across some fascinating insights that I know you will be interested to read.
First, a little thought experiment. I want to invite you to click through to the blog post using the red button bellow. It is nothing out of the ordinary and very simple. I mean, we have all done this almost literally a million times before. Am I right?
So go ahead and click the large red button below. There is a short survey which I will ask you to complete before accessing the blog post. Trust me, it will be worth your while. There are just a few simple questions seeking some of your personal identification information, but this is mostly the same information we share everyday.
Admit it: you’re a little curious, right?
Go ahead, click on the button below to access the blog post. I promise it will be worth your time.
Also, thanks for sharing your information with us! It means a lot knowing we are connected! 🥰
Click the button below to access the post and to answer the short survey.
A Growing Sense of Frustration
Firstly, my apologies for frustrating you. I’d like to see that video of you clicking that red button and not understanding why it didn’t go through to a blog post as promised. 🫣
That was actually part of a thought experiment I have had you participate in.
How did you feel about me asking you to give me some personal information?
Would you have provided it, especially given that you aren’t really sure who it is in reality who wrote this post, if a real human at all. We all know ChatGPT and Claude are our friends. 🤣
I wanted you to experience to feeling of being compromised. Being asked for information and deciding whether you would give it up. Think of the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the uncomfortable truth of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Facebook’s (now META) role in conflict within Myanmar defining what Pasquale describes as “the darker narrative of platform capitalism” (Gorwa, 2019, p. 855).
You’re the experiment. How does it feel?
I have leant on Pink Floyd’s classic anthem released in 1975 for inspiration: “Welcome To The Machine” (Pink Floyd, 1975).
Do you know this song? If not, watch the video above and listen to the lyrics. It was written by Roger Waters out of frustration to the dehumanising commodification of the music industry. The song was created long before digital platforms or the internet, as we know them now, existed. I believe Waters was unknowingly prescient in that he captured a similar phenomenon as it relates to privacy on the internet today. Ramon Lobato captures this trajectory towards commodification in his chapter title “Making Global Markets” in the book ‘Netflix Nations’ (Lobato, 2019).
In a simple experiment above I illustrated the vulnerability that comes protecting with your data and privacy, two different by closely related concepts. Our data and intrusion into our privacy define trophies sought by a shameless commodification of us as individuals that is nearly unparalleled. Data is defined “as information that may be recorded in various forms” (Lovett et al, 2019).
Privacy is under attack in other ways beyond the mining of data. Consider the unsettling question of the widespread use of automated ‘bot’ accounts with capacity to spread information and deceive users that might shape decisions you in turn make relating to your own privacy and data. Beyond the marketisation of digital platform companies, there is another dimension of State interference evident through reports of Chinese computational propaganda. (Bolster and Howard, 2019, p. 2064).
There are laws in Australia that govern privacy such our Privacy Act of 1988. Who makes the rules when it comes to a digital platform run by an unregulated business and operating outside of any national jurisdiction? This is the challenge.
A Crisis of Trust
Digital platforms face “a crisis of trust” (Flew, 2018, p.24). The dynamic is telling. While beyond national jurisdiction digital platforms largely go unregulated, they are increasingly held to account in some fashion because of this deficit of trust from consumers, other non-digital businesses and governments alike. Into this space governments have shown a willingness to make demands on the owners of digital platforms in the fashion of ‘a licence to operate’. The market is never without consequences, but regulation is an unnatural burden on market efficiency.
The World Economic Forum describes personal data as “the new oil” (Flew, 2021, p.79). Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias go further arguing that “unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated”. They draw a link between historical colonialism and this new form of a predatory extractive resource that can literally be mined. (Couldry and Mejias, 2021, p. 336-337). A raw material to be then sold off for secondary processing to a company that would seek to profit off your data.
This is a startling revelation, but the level of concern regarding privacy and security in the digital realm is astoundingly of less concern to some people than they might have towards their bank details or physical security of their house or car. Flew outlines how attitudes towards personal privacy vary between people from what he describes as “privacy fundamentalists” to “privacy pragmatists” through to the “privacy unconcerned”.
Permission ought to be sought for the access and use of personal data, but much like the experiment at the beginning of this blog post often people are willing to thoughtlessly just give it away naively, allowing others to make bank on people’s personal data as loot.
Welcome to the machine.
This short phrase contains three core ideas which speak to what is problematic with the exploitation of privacy and data today.
It sounds so inviting, doesn’t it. As though it is the first time you might have met. A new introduction. The reality is that you are being lured into a false sense of security to where all of your online actions captured as data can be sold for profit. So much for the welcome!
The machine is an excellent framing for online predatory behaviour where data is compromised. The digital platform is built and designed by humans but then it becomes this living entity with global access that can consolidate and aggregate all known information about your behaviour.
Everything you have done online leaves traces of your digital fingerprints. Filling out your personal details becomes more of a formality. You are seen as a user where your data is the product. You mistakenly thought that the digital platform was the product with its features and benefits that help to make your life easier. The more you share, the more they know. And then knowing you they can optimise ads based on your user profiling for increased profit revenue.
The lyrics in the song are in this regard seemingly benign, but reveal a chilling dystopia showing the degree to which we are under surveillance, and not by some authoritarian government:
“It’s alright we know where you’ve been” (Pink Floyd, 1975)
Think of the risks from those who might exploit this space: hackers, malicious actors, those who steal identities and money. That School Year Book profile you completed maybe wasn’t as innocent as you might have thought. Sure, you felt connected, but the reality was more deceptive.
The algorithms used become a reinforcing tool for the shaping of our own interests which then lead to your generation of more data. How much of our own agency is at play? The movie The Matrix comes to mind with respect to agency and decision: “what if I told you…?” Do any of us really have any choice at all? How independent are so-called influencers. They too are fodder within a massive vanity project to make us more compliant to the machine. We crave what we receive in return, desperate for increasingly larger dopamine hits rewarding increased attention.
The lyrics continue raising questions of whose preferences are we really choosing:
“We told you what to dream” (Pink Floyd, 1975)
It is a materialistic world, but not the design of a sinister Neo-Con project to fuel neoliberalism. We have unwittingly and willingly signed up to provide our unpaid digital labour as the means of production serving a business we never met. Profits of the large companies that own the digital platforms demonstrate the power of the market and much to the frustration of governments.
Can you see yourself reflected in the words of Waters, maybe a different brand car but you get the point. Here, he was critiquing the shallowness of executives in the music industry who sought status. Repurposed for the digital age, we are the ones coveting the idols we see on our screens:
“He always ate in the Steak Bar
He loved to drive in his Jaguar” (Pink Floyd, 1975)
Whose life are we really living? Shallowly following the trends served back at us through an algorithm to fetishise a sense of constant need and preference, fuelled by an aggregation of our own data. It is insidious. At what cost connection?
Privacy as a human right
Protection of digital rights emerged from many conferences and reports with much enthusiastic advocacy, support which continues to be championed through civil society political activism. Kari Karppinen addressed the confounding nature of this pursuit given that well-meaning declarations are rarely binding by either States or companies (Karppinen, 2017).
A real concern addresses the vulnerability of those who are marginalised through their activism which might lead them to have increased online monitoring by State agencies (Marwick and Boyd, 2018, p.1158). This phenomenon presents disturbing ethical questions as to how and why governments might take an interest in data that leads to the intrusion into the privacy of others. What of those who are financially insecure or encountering hardship while raising a young family who may be vulnerable to exploitation though their employment status or ability to afford basic household provisions should surveillance of them be done in an economically punitive fashion (Pasquale, 2015, p. 5).
Protecting Privacy: The Dark Web
Nicolas Suzor described an unexpected aftermath of a white nationalist march in Virginia where online exchanges continued on the ‘dark web’ established using its own rules because it is able to be hosted its own site on its own domain through special anonymising browsers (Suzor, 2019, p. 4). An extremist site would have been untenable in the public domain in the light of government scrutiny and market preferences, the morality of which is not discussed in this blog.
A Hollow Rhetoric
“Who makes the rules?” when it comes to the operation of digital platforms on matters of privacy and data capture. Suzor brings a healthy sense of cynicism to the claims of Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook in 2009 then promising a more democratic experience through his platforms. If this was the intention then it was short-lived in the lofty ambition to develop “the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come” quoting Zuckerberg (Suzor, 2019, p. 10-12).
The aspirations of tech-bros to create a “global town square” have fallen short with Suzor noting that “there is no such thing as a “neutral” platform (Suzor, 2019, p. 12). The fictional character of Jared in the brilliantly satirical faux-reality-TV series ‘Silicon Valley’ sums this up well in his idiosyncratic sense of frustration saying “we have no boundaries or protocols” (Judge et al, 2014). He was addressing how their small garage company might function but unintentionally through the genius of the writers mirrored the lack of any global protocols maintained by digital platforms in reality. Ironically, writer of the series Mike Judge would later say that the team decided to cancel the show because they “felt the tech industry had taken a much darker, serious turn” (Sandberg, 2019). Art unwittingly imitating life.
So, welcome to the machine…
Government policy has begun to wrestle more readily with issues of privacy and data capture for the protection of users as consumers since much of this writing upon which this blog is based. Is it a perfect world? Far from it, but it is an improvement from the unregulated jungle from where it emerged.
Pink Floyd were closer to reality than they might have ever imagined. Go back and watch the video again paying attention to the electronica hum running constantly in the background. The machine welcomes you.
References:
Bolsover, G. And Howard, P. (2019). Chinese computational propaganda: automation, algorithms and the manipulation of information about Chinese politics on Twitter and Weibo. Information, Communication & Society. 22:14. 2063-2080. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1476576
Couldry, N. And Mejias, U.A. (2019). Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to. The Contemporary Subject. Television & New Media. 20:4. 336-349. DOI: 10.1177/1527476418796632
Flew, T. (2018). Platforms on Trial. InterMEDIA. 46:2. 24-29. July 2018
Flew, T. (2021). Regulating Platforms. Polity Press. Cambridge.
Gorwa, R. (2019). What is platform governance? Information, Communication & Society. 22:6. 854-871. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X2019.1573914
Judge, M., Altschuler, J. and Krinsky, K. (2014). Silicon valley – Jared to set cooperate rules. HBO. Vs. 1:4. https://youtu.be/QzrPvnOzOig?si=QAx1HYpn8ohYS9hk
Karppinen, K. (2017). Human Rights and The Digital. The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights. Routledge. New York.
Lobato, R. (2019). Making Global Markets. Netflix Nations: The geography of digital distribution. NYU Press. New York.
Lovett, R., Lee, V., Kukutai, T., Cormack, D., Rainie, S.C. and Walker, J. (2019). Good Data Practices For Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance. Good Data. Institute of Network Cultures. Amsterdam.
Marwick, A.E. and Boyd, D. (2018). Understanding Privacy at the Margins. International Journal of Communication. 12:2018. 1157-1165. DOI: 1932-8036/20180005
Pasquale, F. (2015). Introduction – The Need to Know. The Black Box Society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0hch.3
Pink Floyd (1975). Welcome To The Machine. Pink Floyd. https://youtu.be/Jh20cMEgvqc?si=asRFsAW9f4jI1BGT
Sandberg, B. (2019). ‘Silicon Valley’ Showrunners Talk Ending HBO Series: “It’s a Different Kind of Comedy Now”. The Hollywood Reporter. 8 December 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/silicon-valley-finale-explained-showrunners-mike-judge-alec-berg-break-down-final-episode-hbo-comedy-1260546/
Suzor, N. P. (2019). The Hidden Rules of the Internet. Lawless: The Secret Rules That Govern our Digital Lives (pp. 3–9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suzor, N. P. (2019). Who Makes the Rules? Lawless: The Secret That Govern our Digital Lives (pp. 10–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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