I’d like to talk about a common argument of those who play down
the recent developments involving government surveillance.
My first reaction is that this seems
like a reasonable “gotcha”. I must hate government and forgive the evils
of big business, right? Well, neither is true. I don’t hate
many of government’s services, but I do honestly fear its potential to abuse
its unique power over American people and institutions. I’ll resist (with
great effort) making this post a rant about political ideology or philosophy,
and instead just explain the big differences between a company collecting user
data and a government collecting company data.
Let’s talk about two scenarios:
worst-case and likely-case. With a corporation, the likely-case is that
companies give you ads, recommendations, and new products so well targeted it
borders on creepy. Hardware and software makers will collect data on
everything you do on their device or app or site, from to location patterns to
app usage to web browsing and search history.
But what about the worst-case scenario? Well, it’s pretty
similar to what I just described. Big data firms in 2013 are doing basically
everything they can, within the confines of the law, to quantify your behavior
for analysis. In the worst-case, companies
try to sell your data among themselves, even to foreign governments or
criminals, or try to defraud you themselves, in which case you sue or tell a
police officer or get the government involved in some way. Data privacy
laws are new and evolving (and the topic of a future note!), but I fully expect
an equilibrium to be reached within the decade where companies cannot sell or use
your data forever without continued and clear permission. The point is,
businesses are rightly constrained by laws, competition (if you’re being too
shady with your snooping I’ll use the other service) and their need to work
under agreed contracts.
What of the state? I hardly need to share every totalitarian
state, from the U.S.S.R to North Korea to those in the middle east, is built on
propaganda and suppression of dissent. The worst-case scenario with
government is a gradual transition towards silencing or otherwise harassing
anyone who voices their disagreement. Say you’re an activist for the
minority party, a businessman in an unpopular industry, or a journalist merely
reporting all sides. The government might pore through its treasure trove
of information, which can "collected inadvertently" and
"stored indefinitely", to find something to either imprison you, or
bury you under a stream of lawsuits. It could bankrupt you or your
business with harsher regulations for having the "wrong" religious
views or political views, and even blackmail you (a fascinating example of
this is told by user “161719” here, highlighted).
The state has no competition, and you
have no ability to opt out apart from leaving the country. Its
oversight is itself, and answers to no one except frankly weak supranational
organizations like the UNSC and ICC. We are not doomed to lose our
freedom under the big data state, and the government is full
of generally sensible, sane and well-intentioned people. But in the
likely-case, the data from Facebook and Apple and Google, combined with census
data and tax records and traffic light cameras and more, will be subject to
mild but continuous misuse, whether through malevolence or mere foolishness. And
we’ll never know to object, as the entire apparatus is secret. We’re
in an age where both congressional approval (14%) and the share of Americans who
trust government to “do the right thing” most of the time (24%) are at record
lows, and we just received an example of the IRS using data analysis to harass
conservative organizations. Have government officials earned the
right to yottabytes of
personal data to mine as they see fit, a billion of times more data than Facebook?
-Jordan
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