Sustainability of Data Rights
Jake Frassinelli
Why should we care
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” This
quote from George Orwell’s 1984 isn’t necessarily true today, but we are closer to that point than ever before. The last twenty-five years have seen the connection of the world through satellites and cables. From chatting with friends to completing school projects to possibly meeting our future spouses, there is a corner of the internet for just about everyone, and every single bit of it has been watched and noted. The Business Insider found that the worldwide market share of Google last year was over 90%. This is to say that of all of the searching activity that happens online on a given day, Google can track, run tests on, and gain and sell information on 90% of them. With a market value, according to Statistica, of approximately $741 billion, stating this isn’t a lucrative industry is a hard argument to make. Google makes billions every year, profiting off of this model. They use consumers’ data and can turn that into targeted advertisements that have been proven to have a much higher turnover into sales. Google is one of the more transparent companies. They are very open with the data they gather, how they use it, and they even give people an opportunity to delete their data if they want. Then again, so did Facebook.
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Facebook is one of, if not, the largest infringers of our data rights in the western
world. In 2018 it was exposed that they had gathered and sold the personal user data and page information of millions of people to a political data analytics company based out of the U.K. known as Cambridge Analytica. In short, this company used AI and
machine-learning algorithms to create and categorize individuals’ “Data Profile” from the information gained, and from those categories, they were able to tailor certain targeted advertisements that proved to be most effective with people of their demographic. With the use of data in this way, to sell a product or, in Cambridge Analytica’s case, a campaign, the question arises, “Are we losing our right to free choice?” or even, “What is free choice?”
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These are questions with extremely
subjective answers, but I will do my best to look at them from an analytical and objective standpoint. Free choice is generally thought of as the ability to make decisions under one’s own volition or
decide the way one wants to think or view an issue. Where defining this term gets murky is in the face of propaganda and subconscious persuasion. Take a look at the last presidential election an example of this complex ethical dilemma. The data analytics company Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Trump campaign to run advertisements on various media websites, mainly Facebook. Cambridge Analytica used the data that they had gained from Facebook over the previous years to design different types of advertisements and propaganda for different types of people in order to target those most likely to swing their votes in districts most crucial to winning the presidential race. Now, is this ethical? Even if some of these people did consent to giving up some of this information, do they have the right to know this is how it’s being used? The largest question is, if I, as a voter, see a series of advertisements specifically tailored to change my mind, using information that I do not know the campaign running said advertisements has access to, that then cause me to choose to vote differently, was that free choice? I mean, I decided to vote the way I did, right? I would argue that, not only is this unethical and wrong but, it is also an infringement on mental autonomy.
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Again taking inspiration from Orwell’s 1984, those who control the language can
control the thoughts of those using it, and in a world where the language is the internet, no one is safe. The largest threat to one’s protection of their own free thought is believing one is immune to the influence these companies and their information can have on us. Without action from the populous to change the current trajectory of this field there will be no rights left to save. In today’s world of propaganda and buying politicians, it is only a matter of time before it is too late to change anything at all. The longer we allow these companies to take and use our data without our consent, the less likely we are to ever gain the right to give that consent in the first place. The world has gone digital, but our laws are still written in ink, we need to act now or lose the chance to act at all. Without rights to our data, we lose rights to our thoughts.