We let technology into our lives. And now it’s starting to control us

Extract from The Guardian

Rachel Holmes

Internet giants are accessing vast amounts of personal data and using it to shape our behaviour. It’s reminiscent of East Germany under the Stasi

Illustration by Nathalie Lees

Monday 28 November 2016 18.30 AEDT

In 1998, I joined the UK launch team for an e-commerce startup named after the world’s largest river. The smart idea was to harness the unprecedented cataloguing capacity of the emerging internet to sell books – a product with a long shelf-life – online. In those days, now regarded as the classical era in tech history, the boundary between the product consumed and the medium used to deliver it was clear.
Increasingly, the boundary between product and platform is dissolving before our eyes. First, we offered the freedom of the biggest selection of books in the world. Then we said: “If you liked that, you will like this.” We were following you into the bookshop, recording your purchasing history and suggesting your future. It started with books, but it was always intended to be everything, in the end.
Two years later, in 2000, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the internet would become an apparatus that tracks our every move, erasing important aspects of privacy and free speech in our social and political lives. “Left to itself,” he said, “cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.” A sceptical reviewer scoffed: “Lessig doesn’t offer much proof that a Soviet-style loss of privacy and freedom is on its way.”
Sixteen years later, it’s clear that the digital world born in freedom has evolved into a creature of control. Post-Snowden, we know the scale of NSA and GCHQ surveillance. We know we’re being watched. But equally, we might consider that the employee who decides what does and doesn’t go on Facebook for its 1.79 billion active users is the most powerful censor in the world. Do you know her name?

We also know that corporate internet giants gather data to maximise profits from our consumer habits, from grocery shopping to TV viewing patterns. Just like trawlers with dragnets, all sorts of other collateral data gets hauled in along the way. Data surveillance, once intangible and invisible, now blatantly announces its presence in our everyday lives. Mobile accessories and the interconnectivity between gadgets and appliances in our homes – the internet of things – create an unprecedented network of tracking devices capturing data for commerce and government.
The technology we thought we were using to make life more efficient started using us some time ago. It is now attempting to reshape our social behaviour into patterns reminiscent of the total surveillance culture of the medieval village, East Germany under the Stasi, or the white supremacist state of South Africa in which I grew up.
In an increasingly online everyday life, our use of social media has become a medium for normalising the acceptability of intrusion and behavioural correction. We are bombarded by “helpful recommendations” on education, health, relationships, taxes and leisure matched to our tracked user profiles that nudge us towards products and services to make us better citizen consumers. The app told you that you only took 100 steps today. The ad for the running shoes will arrive tomorrow.
We risk allowing ourselves to become a vast network of informants on each other and ourselves. Think about GPS-based location tracking on your mobile phone; think about social media apps where we broadcast our spontaneous thoughts, social lives and relationships.

As individuals we behave on a spectrum of complicity with the demise of our privacy. We know Twitter is broadcasting. We’re generally naive about the limits to our visibility and history on Facebook. We’re in self-denial where there ought to be a reasonable expectation of privacy, as with texts, emails and online shopping. In truth we already know nothing’s private because the corporates and government can get it anyway. And the icing on the cake is that we are paying for our surveillance out of our own hard-pressed pockets.
Whether the internet is a “public good” is a question that has so far focused primarily on anxiety about government intervention into our digital lives. We are rightly concerned that Donald Trump will soon get his hands on the NSA, and that Britain’s snooper’s charter legitimises rather than limits the vast intrusions exposed by Snowden. But just as the internet knows no international borders, neither does it recognise outmoded distinctions between state and corporate power, citizens and consumers and platforms and products.

‘So this is the action I’m taking.’ Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in the TV series The Prisoner. Photograph: Channel 4

The fact that billions of us now use a handful of corporate-owned global platforms to manage pretty much every aspect of our daily lives indicates how fast the potential of digital culture is shrinking. A tectonic rift exists between the corporate apparatuses of Google, Facebook, WhatsApp (now owned by Facebook), Twitter, Apple and Amazon, and the open source and creative commons ideals of the “internet of public good”.
Our concern about government snooping sometimes distracts from self-awareness of our complicity as consumers of products so ubiquitous they have become everyday verbs.
So, I’m going to act. Of course there are all sorts of measures we can take to improve our internet security. Using encryption and password managers, securing our sources. We can even put our mobile phone in a heavy copper purse and drag it round with us. But while there are tools we can use to avoid surveillance and hackers, as a consumer I’m trying to avoid or limit using services offered by corporates who don’t pay their taxes; are idolisers of borderless free trade but arch-enemies of the international labour movement; are destroying privacy and creating an architecture of commercial surveillance of every aspect of our existence.

The so-called hippy libertarians in Silicon Valley are more like unelected tyrants. They demand free speech and low tax to suit them but impose de facto censorship, surveillance and behavioural correction on us. No privacy for us and barely any scrutiny of them. The barons who own the digital kingdom that most of us inhabit declare themselves libertarians but not when our liberties are at stake.
None of the internet giants has unionised employees. Trade unionists are derided by Silicon Valley as modern-day luddites. But the recent landmark UK court ruling that Uber drivers are not self-employed demonstrates that the gig economy does not, in the words of TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady, have to be a rigged economy. “Our role isn’t to try to stop this progress, it’s to make sure that technology is used to make working people’s lives better, and to make sure the gains from new technology are fairly shared.”
I’m also worried about how we use social media. The so-called neutral platforms facilitate hate against women, racism and homophobia, and they may have put Trump in the White House as well. It may not be the platform itself, but the way in which it favours those outside the conventional media establishment and its notions of balance. Analytics expert Laeeq Khan suggests a behavioural change in our social media habits: “As social media consumers, we should resist limiting ourselves to an echo chamber of like-minded voices.”
Trump dominated rivals on social media. He tweeted, Facebooked and Instagrammed directly to followers, apparently personally and spontaneously. It wasn’t necessarily the content that people identified with, but the carefully crafted lack of spin. This modern-day Big Brother mastered Twitter by propagating a sense of immediacy, blatant expression and human risk, rather than balance and caution. What Trump tweeted at 3am, the mainstream media reported the next day.
So this is the action I’m taking. I have stopped using Google as my search engine and deactivated my Facebook account. WhatsApp followed when it announced in August that it had abandoned its principled pro-privacy stance and would share data with its new parent and others in the “Facebook family of companies”. I’m putting on my tin hat, dusting off my open-source kitbag, and heading off to the dark woods to join the resistance. Like Patrick McGoohan playing Number 6 in The Prisoner, I expect it’s going to take many failed attempts to try to escape the Village.