The Death (And Rebirth) of Privacy

With much of the world homebound in the midst of this global pandemic, more and more of our time is being spent online, within the digital world of the internet.

Each day we connect with our loved ones, conduct our business, keep ourselves entertained, and watch the chaos unfold around us through little rectangles of technicolor light in our living rooms and offices. But do we know who’s watching us from the other side?

While we innocently search, post, watch, share, and communicate with one another in many forms, behind the scenes our every move is being tracked, catalogued, and analyzed by the very platforms we use to conduct our daily lives online.

The online services surveilling us, tech giants like Google and Facebook chief among them, have been abusing the power technology granted them and the trust we placed in them. And we have allowed this abuse to go on for far too long.

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How did we get here?

When Big Data Got Big

As the race to conquer the world of the bit and the byte gained steam, the tech industry began to believe that Data was the New Oil. There was a rush to turn on the taps and fill up the tank with as much data as could be found.

As a young and idealistic data engineer, I too was swept up in these high tech visions of progress. The quest for data seemed like the quest for truth. I thought if we could gather more, we could learn more, and in turn we could do more.

And to be sure, in some areas this explosion of information has led to the unequivocal betterment of people’s lives. But on our most popular gateways to the internet at large, search engines and social media, the data is people’s lives.

And what is this detailed map of our lives used for? It’s primarily used to better serve ads, to manipulate people into clicking on them, and as time goes by, for far more insidious purposes.

The digital world built by the likes of Google, Facebook, and their network of cronies in the AdTech industry wasn’t built purely to serve their billions of users.

Their business model is built around serving their real customers, advertisers. In case you haven’t heard the old yarn already:

“You’re not the customer. You’re the product.”

Your life is tracked, atomized, categorized, and optimized for the benefit of advertisers. (And to an increasing extent, governments.)

It doesn’t have to be like this. Technology built with a pure purpose can be a pure good in the world. But Facebook and Google are not social media or search companies anymore. They are surveillance companies. The more they know about the intimate details of your life, the better they can sell you.

Surveillance Capitalism

Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff refers to this now massive industry as surveillance capitalism. She likens the techniques of the surveillance capitalists as to those of a one way mirror.

The fact is, these companies know if you were fully aware of what they were doing with your data, the story of your life, you would be disgusted. And then you might choose to stop using their services. So they took the screen you’re reading this on and turned it into that one way mirror.

They can see you, but you can’t see them.

Unfortunately it gets worse than that. As it turns out, surveillance capitalists were not content just to track, profile, and predict you, and then to sell that information to the highest bidder.

Remote Control

The surveillance capitalism industry has long since moved on to trying to control you too, a process they politely call “actuating.” (A word regular people commonly reserve for robots.)

“Surveillance capitalists now develop ‘economies of action,’ as they learn to tune, herd, and condition our behavior with subtle and subliminal cues, rewards, and punishments that shunt us toward their most profitable outcomes.” — Shoshana Zuboff

Examples abound, such as Facebook’s experiment wherein they intentionally caused depression in a number of their users, the psychologically corrosive filter bubbles caused by overbearing search ‘personalization’ and algorithmically curated news feeds, and Youtube’s opaque, addictive, greedy, and conspiracist fueling video recommendation algorithm.

These algorithms are not built for you. They are built to get you addicted and to optimize ad clicks. These companies may deny this in public, and they may even try to paint over the worst of the abuses. But there’s no denying their business model. Their priorities are clear. The consequences are at best an afterthought.

This Isn’t Normal

If we applied the same standards to the digital world as we do to the physical one we would have ostracized these creeps from our daily lives long ago.

Imagine if a local business owner sent someone to follow you from store to store, watching your every move, writing down your every attribute, and then sent hordes of sign wielding maniacs at you on every corner, with messages tailored to best capture your attention and influence your behavior. Imagine if they all got together and compared notes on you, so they could target you all the better the next day. You would call the police!

But this is what surveillance capitalists are doing to us each and every day on the internet. It’s just easier to disguise online, hidden in the background in quiet snippets of javascript you’re never likely to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s safe to say that on a great majority of the websites you’re likely to visit, alongside the content you’re actually seeking, these surveillance companies are running code on the page to uniquely identify you, to follow you from site to site, and to construct a detailed map of everything you do online along the way. This is often called 3rd party advertising. I’d call it stalking.

And of course, on the sites at the center of this practice, such as Google and Facebook, all of the data you provide and all of the data they can collect from your use of the services is recorded by and used for the benefit of the company.

Besides collecting who you are and what you’re doing on the internet , they collect where you go, what you say, what you purchase, what’s happening in your home, and more. In many cases this still goes on even if you figure out how to change the umpteen account settings to tell Google to stop.

But Wait, There’s More!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. The extensive treasure trove of data constantly collected by this AdTech abomination has turned out to be too attractive for other aspiring mass surveillers to ignore.

Governments frequently compel these businesses to give them access to the intimate data they possess about the users of their services, through both legal and illegal means.

This is now a symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) relationship. Governments are granted access to neatly prepared personal data held in sprawling data centers, and in return they are perhaps amenable to some favorable terms when it comes to regulating (or not regulating) the activities of these companies.

They may sling mud at each other from time to time, but as long as the data keeps flowing neither side wants the merry go round to come to an end. This is an enormous issue all by itself, and the rest is best left for another day.

Enough is Enough

So given the enormous negative effects caused by these services, why do we put up with them? What exactly have they done to earn our trust?

Facebook for one, has a long and notorious history of mishandling user data. See Onavo, Facebook’s spyware disguised as a VPN. Or the well known Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which resulted in a $5 Billion fine that amounted to a slap on the wrist when compared to Facebook’s revenue. Or just check out this practically endless list of privacy violations the company has committed.

As for Google, they have their own laundry list of controversies. Besides doing their best to track you through every moment of your life, their track record of multiple anti-competitive advertising practices, backroom deals with GrubHub to screw local restaurants, and using their cash hoards to fight data privacy legislation, they also recently attempted to build a censored search engine for China that would have blocked searches for concepts such as “human rights.”

Put it all together and it’s starting to seem less like a coincidence that the company recently dropped their original motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”

Beyond Apologies

After all these years, it appears clear that these companies are not going to go out of their way to protect your privacy, no matter how many press releases they announce to the contrary, or how many technical bandaids they apply to the gaping wound that is the surveillance capitalism business model.

The problem is that their business model is violating your privacy. These companies are not going to kill the golden goose as long as it’s still laying highly profitable eggs full of user data.

Zuckerberg for one has been apologizing about privacy violations for a decade. But apologies without solutions are just empty promises. And we know what he really thinks about his users

Show Me The Incentive, I’ll Show You The Outcome

The basic problem is that these services are not actualy designed to be valuable to you. They are expressly designed to be valuable to the real customer, advertisers.

If you click, they get paid, even if you immediately leave the page in disgust. Every clickbait headline, pointless slideshow, and deceptive banner ad is another valuable impression for the AdTech network behind it. Your time, their money.

Have you noticed that more and more Google searches result in an endless scroll of low quality listicles promising the world, but devoid of any actually valuable information? These sites rank high in Google search results because they get more clicks, which serve more ads, which puts more money in Google’s pockets. That’s how the system is designed.

Does this strike anyone as a good thing for the actual users of the internet? Surveillance capitalists actively encourage this behavior by promulgating their devotion to the ad supported business model around the web. And by participating we are incentivizing this garbage to proliferate. Is that really what we want?

The reason AdTech is so corrosive really comes down to incentives. Do I think the head honchos of surveillance capitalism are evil people, hell bent on polluting the world’s information environment, and ushering in a dystopian era of mass surveillance? No. I genuinely don’t. But their business model incentivizes them to do so anyway.

Google started with the goal to, “Organize All the World’s Information”, and Facebook to, “Connect Everyone.” And to be sure, these companies have striven for and made great strides towards these goals.

But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the business model that drove these tech titans to the top of the market is now taking the world in the wrong direction. Information replaced by misinformation. Connection replaced by chaos. People replaced by propaganda.

So What?

Of course, many of you probably knew about all these privacy violations already, in whole or in part, but have just been pushing this discomfiting knowledge below the surface. I counted myself in this camp until just a few short weeks ago.

The final straw came for me quite accidentally. I had been using an app called Unroll.me to help me easily unsubscribe from all of the unwelcome marketing newsletters which seemed to be endlessly creeping into my gmail inbox.

One day, the app stopped working correctly on my phone, and as I logged into the app on my laptop to see what was wrong, I noticed a little snippet of blue text under the login button, tucked away inconspicuously, referencing something about “how my data is used.” Which made me wonder, why is my data being used at all? And why didn’t anybody bother to let know?

This is how I came to discover that in the approximately four years since I installed Unroll.me, they had been purchased by a marketing intelligence company and had enacted a change in how the app functions. This little app was actually collecting the CONTENT of my private emails without my knowledge in order to target me with ads for YEARS. And who knows where else that data has been sold by now.

I was livid, and I’m not the only one. I deleted the app immediately, and now I’ve switched off of gmail too. Google’s weasel words about “giving you control over your data” are just empty platitudes when gmail permits this kind of abuse and allows it to fly under the radar.

And not for nothing, I’m a software engineer specializing in data engineering, and this malfeasance escaped me for years. I can only imagine what they are getting away with when it comes to their users who are less technically inclined.

Do you know what they’re getting away with when it comes to you?

Perhaps the picture of the present I’ve painted thus far seems awfully grim. But there is good news on the horizon.

Have You Tried Turning it Off and On Again?

The truth is, if we don’t like surveillance capitalism, we don’t have to participate. Privacy honoring companies who respect your individual rights are springing up left and right with cutting edge technology solutions to these problems. And they are ready today.

End-to-end encryption can make it technically impossible for service providers or governments to access your private data in any way.

Clever use of cryptocurrency can reorient advertising incentives around ethical business models.

The future of technology is bound to be one where people are empowered, not productized, as the nascent Web 3.0 movement picks up steam.

Many of these services have come so far that even without considering their respect for your privacy, they provide a better overall experience than Big Tech’s data siphoning services.

By voting with our attention, by giving our valuable clicks to somebody who will treat them with care, and by keeping our data with responsible providers who use it exclusively for services we find valuable, we can make the endless stream of ill gotten information simply dry up.

On that day, the profit motive the surveillance capitalists seem to worship above all else will force them to start respecting user’s privacy as well, or else perish. And if that’s the way they choose to go out, then I say good riddance.

If we choose it, resources will flow to those companies who treat their users as customers instead of cattle, enabling them to build phenomenal services that seek to empower their users, rather than to manipulate them.

With their interests truly aligned with those of their users, these services are sure to surpass the technical feats of today’s tech giants. If we support them, one day soon they will make Google Search look like Ask Jeeves and Facebook like look Friendster. (Although that might be an improvement on Facebook at this point.)

The Grass is Actually Greener

A few years ago, abandoning AdTech may have been a difficult task but today it is downright easy to opt out of surveillance capitalism. And I promise it will immediately improve your digital life.

Since I began transitioning to privacy respecting services, my online activities are more peaceful, more intentional, and more beautiful. My webpages are free from obnoxious banner ads, autoplay videos, and incessant clickbait linkspam. I am more often filled with joy at the serendipity of results in an expressly non-personalized search. And when I send an end to end encrypted email or private message, I can say whatever it is that I please without fear, because I am confident that only my intended recipient will read it. This is a sublime feeling, reminiscent of the wonder and awe many of us felt when we saw that first page on the world wide web open up way back when.

I want that feeling for you too. Which is why I’m going to show you how easy it is to make the change. Here’s what I did already. It took less than a day of clicking around, and absolutely zero dollars, a small price to pay for liberty if I’ve ever seen one, and perhaps the best bargain you’re ever likely to find.

All of This Can Be Yours

To put a stop to 95% of all the snooping inflicted upon you on the web, this is all it takes.

• A new browser
• A new search engine
• A new email client
• A new secure messaging app, I recommend one of the two below.
• Apple’s iMessage is end to end encrypted between iOS devices, and Apple CEO Tim Cook has ensured the company has taken a strong stance when it comes to user security in the past.
• Signal also provides a great secure cross platform messaging app.
• If you want to take it to the next level you can get yourself a VPN as well, to prevent snooping by your ISP and other more persistent unsavory characters.

DuckDuckGo, my new privacy respecting search engine, also has a great guide on how to live without google if you’d like to dive in in more detail.

As for social media, not every platform is as invasive and irresponsible with your data as Facebook and their properties (notably Instagram and WhatsApp), but Snapchat, Twitter, and the rest are all ultimately addicted to the surveillance capitalism business model.

I’d say, if you can live without it, get off of Facebook. They collect too much personal information, have their tendrils in too much of the web, are too irresponsible with our data, and the results served by their News Feed’s Artificial Stupidity System is too toxic to the human brain for anyone to be safely exposed for any significant period of time. (Not a Doctor.)

Download your photos and contacts and anything else you care about to somewhere you’ll actually own it, and delete your account. There are better ways to keep in touch, and you won’t miss it, because you never needed it in the first place.

As for the others, I would consider everything you post on one of these platforms to be public information forevermore. If that’s OK with you, then go ahead and use them. I still use Twitter. I’m not a complete zealot.

Today, the steady encroachment of surveillance capitalism and government surveillance into our private lives may feel inevitable. But it was not so long ago that companies like Yahoo and MySpace seemed invincible as well. Today’s tech titans will one day suffer the same fate. And it will happen as soon as we all start clicking somewhere else.

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