Digital Policy

The Digital Oil Slick

  • There is no delineation between private and public for Big Tech

  • Social media is the main source of news for young people

  • The extent of Big Tech data abuses are legion

William Priestley

Society, as we know it today, was built on oil. The one of tomorrow will be built on tech. Both have facilitated exponential growth and progress that have redefined the human experience for the better. There has, however, been a price to pay for this development. The hazards of ‘Big Oil’ are well known to us through decades of environmental and political scandals; the shortcomings of ‘Big Tech’ only recently so. Such was the excitement of this new and ‘disruptive’ industry that few of us realised the legerdemain at play. 

Whereas ‘Big Oil’ did battle over the environment, ‘Big Tech’ does so over data. The collection of personal data can be of direct benefit to the consumer. The suggestion of movies based on previous preferences or highlighting of specific holiday discounts is both convenient and attractive. However, when we purchase a pair of shoes online there is an overt choice to be a consumer. You may perceive it both reasonable and desirable that your selection on a website is recorded for future reference: like an attentive shop assistant who remembers your style. What is less palatable is the recording of the choices we make in a personal capacity. An algorithm constantly scanning your personal email, as is the case with Gmail, or monitoring an online family photo album are very different propositions.  

All Advertising is Manipulation

If you’re reading this article on an electronic device, there’s a good chance an algorithm is keeping a record of data such as how fast you read, when you take a break or when you check something else. A profile will exist of people like you and their tendency to make purchases after reading technology articles. You’ll soon receive tailored ads. There is no delineation between private and public in the world of ‘Big Tech’. The net for data harvesting is all-inclusive. 

To one extent or another, all advertising is manipulation. A company is trying to persuade you to purchase a product you may not have previously wanted or even needed. With old-fashioned television advertising, we all saw the same ad at the same time. Techniques have been enhanced over the years with product placement and subliminal endorsements but the individual was protected in the herd. This old world boundary has now been disrupted. 

On social media, ads are targeted to individual profiles, constantly tweaked to dial into a specific personal psyche. It is a much more invasive manipulation designed to expose the triggers and weaknesses of an individual consumer profile. This is a level of penetration that Don Draper and his Mad Men colleagues could only dream about and represents a real ethical dilemma.  There are few limits to the extent to which ‘Big Tech’ can use this modern psychological artillery against relatively unsuspecting and ill-equipped human minds.   

Democracy Distortion

The second danger with data harvesting and manipulation is outside of commerce. As early as 2014, Facebook proudly reported on how they’ve experimented with manipulating people’s emotions and changing voter turnout. This is a consequence that can be successfully deployed to disrupt societies and we now know from the recent US election that the price to do so is remarkably low. Perhaps the most frightening aspect, though certainly amongst considerable competition, is that during the aforementioned US election Facebook didn’t always know who its customers were. 

This disruption is facilitated by the fact that Facebook editorialises individual newsfeeds. What would be the consequence if Wikipedia showed different versions of entries to each person based on a secret profile of that person? Pro-Trump visitors would see an article completely different from the one shown to anti-Trump people, but there would be no accounting of what was different or why. This is an epochal development for the functioning of democracy. The version of the world you are seeing may well be invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa. 

Partisan TV channels like Fox News and MSNBC maintain powerful filter bubbles, but they cannot match the impact of Facebook and Google because television is a one-way broadcast medium. Many people misunderstand this danger by mapping their experience of social media onto all users of social media. One might be an infrequent, educated and highly objective users of Facebook, who engages with several news sources. However, as far back as 2016, the BBC was reporting that social media had overtaken television as the main source of news for young people (18-24). In some countries, such as Burma, Facebook is the news, which sometimes tragic consequences. Following atrocities there in 2018, the company was warned by the UN that it risked being dragged into international war crimes for enabling ethnic cleansing.

For Engagement See Addiction

A third danger exists when these techniques are used to sell ‘Big Tech’ itself. The purpose here is solely to engender ‘engagement’, or what most people better understand as addiction. The longer people spend on Instagram or Snapchat the more valuable they are as prospective consumers for advertisers. When we check a news feed on Facebook, we are playing multidimensional chess against massive artificial intelligences that have a terrifying array of information at its disposal. 

Employing the entire suite of casino-related techniques even the most diligent user can find herself down a ‘Youtube-hole’. Too much of this kind of stimulus will have negative consequences for anyone, but the effects are particularly dangerous for children and adolescents. Lower sleep quality, an increase in stress, anxiety, depression, an inability to concentrate, irritability and insomnia are just the consequences we have recently learned about. Given what we now know about sleep and mental health, an increasingly strong argument can be made that these effects are no less harmful than those of cigarettes or alcohol. 

Abuses

Aside from eye-watering tax avoidance figures, the examples of Big Tech’ abusing trust are legion. In 2010 Google illegally collected data from people’s homes during its Streetview project. It happened in thirty countries and having been fined for impeding the corresponding US investigation, the company falsely promised to delete all data. It has been revealed that Amazon Echo and Google Home clandestinely listen in on domestic conversations citing a curious inability to improve service through other means; Samsung Smart TVs, meanwhile, just listen in without an excuse; Google Chrome covertly accesses your computer’s microphone and camera during use; and that Facebook surreptitiously downloads calls and texts from its users on Android phones. Apple is the world leader in fines from the E.U., closely followed by Google.


All this is not to say ‘Big Tech’ is maleficent. Like ‘Big Oil’ before it, the industry has been one of the driving forces for progress and innovation. It is to say, however, that there is overwhelming and indisputable evidence that it cannot be relied on to self-regulate. That the once joyous creativity of Silicon Valley is now in danger of being defined by surveillance and manipulation is an increasingly persuasive argument. ‘Big Tech’ is in business for business, just like ‘Big Oil’ or ‘Big Tobacco’. They are neither better nor worse than any other industry, despite what we might have hoped.