The politics of data privacy and how culture eats Big Tech for breakfast

My friend Fredrik Winter who leads Oslo Business Region, a municipally owned startup accelerator, asked his network about the backlash against big tech:

“Something has happened in the world of tech, and in the summer heat I wonder: In the last year there has been a sharp blow of relatively hard criticism of “big-tech”, like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Elon Musk also gets serious criticism for his attempt to help save children in Thailand.

 1 // On the one hand, a general tech optimism flourishes about a democratizing future of what in the past was only available to are now available to all (3 billion already have smartphones and soon 6).

2 // On the other hand, a story about a few great tech monopolists who grabs with everything, controls the world with artificial intelligence, and is increasingly moving from reality to anyone who is not connected.

3 // On the third side, hybridization of technologies such as Blockchain, which promises a “hippie” decentralized transparent distribution of power, where established institutions lose power for the benefit of most people, while at the same time having a built-in capitalism written into the protocol where money, tokens, and cryptocurrency create traditional speculations and greed.”

Technopoly or decentralized commons?

The tech community was quick to answer. Confirming that the tide is turning, many had noticed how the public mood turned darker. Facebook data was misused to subvert people’s opinions and sway electoral votes in the last U.S. election. “Black box algorithms” increasingly reinforce systemic social injustices. Not to speak of systemic sexism and brogrammers who reinforce the white, male monoculture in Silicon Valley. Or how Amazon continues to crush the corner store while Jeff Bezos is on track to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. It seems as if a few large behemoths are eating the world cooked in a diluted broth of local traditions and culture.

But technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Nor is technology a one-directional variable unaffected by the ecosystem it operates in. Technological applications are often linked to local traditions, political power structures, and demography. There is no “one” future new technology will create, but several. AI, smart sensors, distributed grid technologies, 5G, blockchain can be used to empower people or to strip them of it. History, even language, will decide.

China

The ancient civilization leaping forward under Chairman Mao Zedong at the cost of millions of lives and numerous atrocities, has become one of the world’s main economic engines. China is home to some of the world’s most advanced face recognition and deep learning algorithms. Dahua Technologies, whose cameras a few years ago were hacked in a pervasive DDoS attack, breaks records with labeled face data in the wild (LFW) facial recognition and is currently the world’s deepest neural network with over one hundred layers. Alibaba-backed SenseTime allowed a police department to catch 69 suspects in one hour using advanced computer vision and deep learning. Face recognition technology is now fully deployed in identity verification, crime prediction and even attractiveness ratings in a way that would have been intolerable in other parts of the world. This surveillance is meeting resistance by the Chinese people with growing concerns over lost privacy, We’d be amiss to assume countries with longer civil rights traditions automatically will adopt a surveillance regime just because the technology exists. The Chinese word for privacy, yinsi, has the negative connotation of “shamefully secret”, which could make it harder to defend against surveillance regardless of technological context.

Europe

Even in Norway, the word privacy doesn’t translate well to the digital sphere. The narrower term personvern (person protection) is used for the more pointed goal of protecting personally identifiable data. Privacy is a much wider concept and not always as sacrosanct as in the U.S. For example, while it is illegal to post images of minors online, the Western democracy publishes individual tax reports yearly for public perusal, a custom often considered intrusive elsewhere.

The European Union has taken the most proactive privacy stance so far. The Right to be Forgotten legislation was an important precursor to the more embracing GDPR legislation earlier in the spring. While the data protection bill of 2014 was about refusing to hand over ownership of our identity to Google and Facebook, the GDPR legislation goes even further and protects people from selling it to third parties and certain types of targeted advertisement.

While GDPR protects EU citizens from personal data leakage it might halt innovation of many promising new technologies that depend on some consent to data sharing. Many blockchain applications are incompatible with GDPR in its current format, and this could stifle the EU’s innovation potential. The very nature of blockchain technology is to retain personal information indefinitely, resulting in “The Blockchain – GDPR Paradox”.

USA

The contrast between EU’s GDPR and the U.S. Congress’ covert erosion of privacy protection is stark.

While the cultural roots around privacy are strong in a country founded by people who fled religious persecutions, things that can be assigned monetary value tend to win in a capitalist nation such as the U.S. And in the information age, one of the hottest commodities is data. A few months ago, the U.S. Congress berated Mark Zuckerberg for his company’s failure to protect its users’ privacy after third parties sold Facebook data to Cambridge Analytica, which used it to persuade users’ opinions. The hearing was widely televised, offering Congress members the chance to portray themselves as the guardians of people’s privacy. Few know that the same Congress members exactly a year earlier reversed a law that would ban the telecom industry from selling their users browsing data to third parties. It takes about 6 data points to de-anonymize a user profile, meaning your ISP could reveal far more sensitive information than Facebook ever did. That is, assuming you are more uncomfortable sharing your search data than your social media traffic. But Zuckerberg gave Congress members a much better opportunity for grandstanding than interrogating a less famous ISP executive ever could. And again – money. Here is a list of how much lawmakers received in donations from telecom companies.

There is another new chasm developing between Silicon Valley and the government in Washington. The West coast-based technology hub tracing its roots to the counter culture of the sixties makes no secret about its stance against president Trumps’ policies. Last month employees at Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon protested selling facial recognition technologies, web hosting and cloud services to law enforcement and its contractors working with ICE due to the current administration’s controversial anti-immigration efforts. When even the main purveyors of said technology are willing to compromise its earning potential on ethical grounds, culture does indeed eat both strategy and technology for breakfast.

How will the emerging cultures of a new generation guide technology and privacy issues?

Surveys show Generation Z is not becoming gullible sheeple of technological overlords. Quite the opposite. While they continue to grapple with smart screen addictions, digital natives seem to more clearly see the darker sides of the digital revolution than those who encountered the same technologies later in life.

The Digital Frontier has many parallels to the Western Frontier of previous centuries. While settlers searched for land on which they could grow their crop, owning mineral rights under the topsoil turned out to be where the biggest value was found. Although striking oil might still make you rich, our children will more likely protect the deep sediments of personal data than the petroleum they might find under their physical turfs. Aware of the price of their personal data, they will realize the monetary value they forsake if don’t protect their digital mining rights. Deep learning algorithms and data mining technologies are mere tools, and without data they are meaningless. Future battles will be fought around rights and ownership of data. The outcome of those battles will depend on political traditions, generational change, and local cultures. One thing is certain, the technology we haven’t eaten for breakfast yet, our kids will certainly eat for dessert.