We must remember Bernard Keane’s next birthday. Let’s chip in and get our guy the counter-drone he needs. He’s earned it this week for a dogged refusal to join the rest and offer a Facebook “scandal”. Instead, he gives us a scare.
We should be scared, and not principally of Facebook, nor even of the votes it purportedly helped sway. We should be scared witless of the thing BK calls a “surveillance civilisation”. But also of an economy in which existence itself becomes a commodity.
No, I didn’t mean that in some lofty moral way. We haven’t got time to talk posh about the consequences of no longer being truly human, etc. But we must find time to consider the points laid out by Keane and a handful of others in recent days and ask: what does it mean for the stuff of our lives to be sold?
Organisations collect the information we produce. This information has value. And you might not care one bit that dozens of government agencies and thousands of firms make decisions or profits based on you. You do nothing that is unlawful and buy nothing much brand new. In short, you’re not one of the “dumb fucks” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg so infamously described.
You’re not naively smug, either, perhaps unlike Fairfax’s Matt Wade who wrote yesterday that he could never support a platform that “exploits family, friendship and other personal connections to make money”. It’s the truly inspiring account of one man’s struggle to retain the simpler things. It’s published on a corporate website that incessantly nags for a login on a page that holds advertisements for family health insurance, family life insurance, family phone plans and loving family homes. Lol, like they say on Facebook.
Still. Even you and I with our VPNs. Even those of us with memories long enough to remember that this Facebook “scandal” is just like all those other Facebook scandals, which only ever reveal that data theft has long been a commonplace revenue model. Even we must think about a future that has the exchange and distribution of our data as its base.
It’s not that I mind if a professional thief surmises that I dislike white wine and am therefore less likely to vote. (Yes. This is the sort of thing adult humans are now paid to do.) It’s more that I can’t get my head around the shape of the coming political economy.
[Facebook’s privacy invasion is the business model of the entire internet]
Now, I’m no fan of selling the commodity of labour, but I do get how that model has been sustained for a few hundred years. At some point, perhaps soonish, the innovations that have been produced by the commodification of labour will make a fair whack of labour unnecessary. This means I might not have a job. This means that somebody has to think of a new way to keep me buying commodities (one slightly less stupid than Universal Basic Income). This means that making my data someone else’s commodity seems like an economic oversight. Why send targeted ads to the non-voting, non-white-wine-drinking lady when you know she has lost utter faith in liberal democracy because she has no money to buy a pacifying drink of any sort.
I mean. I know they’re all very important and clever over there at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. They are experts in electronic mind control and can work to make Putin the actual king of the world even as they accept handsome contracts from the US and UK governments. They fabricated the convenient cover of wage stagnation, shuttered industry and a big financial crisis to make it look like Hillary Clinton lost for good reason. Clever guys.
But not so clever that they haven’t thought that paying us to provide the data they will soon use to coerce us might keep them and their mates in their creepy business.
Let me be clear to the Mercers, to Zuckerberg and to that Tesla chap who surely can’t keep making money selling the right to pollute. I am very happy for you all to exploit my “family, friendship and other personal connections” if it means I can make some money. I’ll use it to buy myself some food and Bernard Keane a gift.
Shove that in your data set and get back to me.
Helen, I love your attitude, but believe it’s more complicated than that. This has been a professional area of expertise for me for about 20 years. Here’s my take:
1. They already (mostly) pay for your data: it’s paid for in-kind with ‘free’ apps and hosted services. The high capital cost and modest operational costs to provide these freebies is more than offset by the rent they get from monitoring what you do with them, and on-selling that. I say ‘mostly’ though because financial institutions have also been collecting data on your purchasing for as long as you’ve held credit cards, and they don’t pay you for what they learn.
2. If you don’t use networked services they can’t monitor them, so you already have an opt-out right — as limiting as that can be professionally and socially. The problem is that the public doesn’t really understand what’s being monitored and how it can be aggregated and used, and who can get it. So in a contractual sense, it’s not informed, considered consent.
3. Not all of the data attached to your behaviour belong to you. Were you to write about me on your Facebook page (if you have one), you’re actually supplying mineable data about me. Were you and Mr Rundle to take a selfie at some pub and you tag him in the picture, that’s data about him. If the photo contains GPS metadata (many electronic picsnow do), that also tells everyone where he was and when. The fact that you possess these data or even generated them doesn’t necessarily make them solely yours.
4. The data are far more valuable (and threatening) when aggregated with information you didn’t know it’d join up with. For example, Paypal or a credit card company already know a lot about you — enough for algorithms to already know if you’re dating or having an affair (they’ve been able to track marriage and divorce probabilities with reasonable accuracy for about 25 years.) But join that to Facebook data, and they’ll also know with whom, where you met, what you do together, what the age difference is (if any), and whether either party is at risk from contracting a communicable disease. *That’s* what you’re actually giving up — not merely how you might havelt about the smashed avocado and dukka at breakfast.
5. Once those data are surrendered it’s near permanent, and virtually impossible to recall them, so they’ll join in future with things you didn’t even know they can join with. It’s very hard to keep inventory of what you’ve lost, to whom, when, and its current market value.
So: how would you price it, Helen? What sum would you advise a fourteen year-old reader to forever surrender the biography of her youth for?
I agree with you: BK wrote an excellent article, but I think the problem is more vexed than simply giving privacy a market valuation.
Still, I’m glad you’re talking about it.
I don’t like the first point, it is taking the monopolists at their word.
Consider the humble swine and the farmer. The pig and the farmer aren’t in an arrangement to trade their life for the ‘care’ of the farmer, and yet the farmer pays for food and expends labour in their care. The pig could do this by themselves but they were born into being a farm animal and not free.
Without the Zuckerbergs of this world people would have built socmed themselves. They provide a free service because no one values it enough to pay for it. We come in to post and they Milk us. This is not a normal capitalist arrangement between humans. It is created by legal voodoo. Would it be better if this worked more like wage labour? Dunno, but it would at least be consistent with existing social relations, rather than being really weird.
The most interesting thing about this comes back to two different crikey contributors over the last few days. Feel free to own up to your comments, people.
The first was from someone in the advertising industry who remarked that the dirty secret of advertising is that it doesn’t work, or has the tiniest influence, even when targeted. I found that both hugely instructive and hilarious. Perhaps we will also realise that public relations is also a largely useless practice and we can get rid of two useless and sometimes evil industries. Imagine the rise in overall productivity when that happens.
Secondly, a wonderful commentary by a contributor, advising that these data miners are looking for signals in the noise, but that sometimes it is noise all the way down.
Loved that.
I think he was being optimistic, I think the ‘noise all the way down’ is actually the default, and that real insights are actually quite rare. The non-voting white wine drinkers to me is a classic example of fake facts, correlations that might seem interesting but actually offer no insight, not one jot, a non-fact.
In that sense, these oh so clever algorithms mirror the human brain, taught through millennia to recognise patterns as a means to self-preservation, even when those patterns aren’t there. So that tiger in the brush wasn’t a tiger at all, just an interesting flash of colours as the wind blew through the breeze.
Big data is at this point in its evolution, and it is largely being overseen by an idiot, us, with very little filtering. It is the ‘fast thinking’ of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, with no intervening slow thinking, and dumb people are taking correlation and confusing it with fact. It’s yet another example of us marveling at our cleverness, not recognising that we are slightly evolved Chimpanzees.
Not that I advocate giving out information about ourselves willingly. Ruv’s comments about them working out if you are likely having an affair are true, if you were stupid enough to leave bread crumbs lying around everywhere.
And by the by, Universal Basic Income is a much less silly idea than you give it credit, the only better idea I have heard is Bill Mitchell’s Universal Job Guarantee. Give it more thought, HR.
Not sure what your problem is with Tesla selling the right to pollute. That’s what the government does when it introduces a carbon tax. Cheers.
No more trouble with Elon than with anyone. I just enjoy mentioning that Genius Clean Boy is funded by emissions.
I think I did the Problem with UBI thing with you already, Dog’s.
I kinda get the opposition to UBI but I also kinda don’t.
Humans are moving to a point where a vast amount of labour becomes obsolete. When that happens, how do we ensure resources are still (roughly) apportioned based on their need? I work, therefore I eat. What happens when I can’t work?
I can’t imagine a future that doesn’t include a program that universally provides at least subsistence levels. Call it what you will, UBI… something else. I don’t know.
Without every human having access to food, water, shelter, utilities and healthcare as a baseline how will we ever address the fact that workers must let themselves be exploited in order to survive?
Which is not to say that UBI is a standalone fix – public ownership of anything required for subsistence levels of the population.
Dog’s Breakfast wrote:
> these oh so clever algorithms mirror the human brain, taught through millennia to recognise patterns as a means to self-preservation, even when those patterns aren’t there
No, that’s not how they all work, DB. The ones you’re thinking of may be neural networks which are indeed loosely modelled on neurophysiology, but that’s just one form of machine learning, and machine learning itself doesn’t include a range of statistical modelling techniques that work quite differently. Ultimately the accuracy of any predictive modelling can be tested the same way physics is: by making specific predictions over significant populations and independently evaluating how well they worked. This reduces the error rates down to the usual levels we accept when making decisions.
Although only publicised in the media in recent years, the field of data mining is more than a quarter century old, and was already seeing limited success two decades ago. With our ability to gather, store, process and join data having grown by orders of magnitude since — especially our ability to store and mine semi-structured data like photographs and documents — we’ve come a long way. There’s an adage that technology is often over-estimated in the short-term and under-estimated in the longer term: that was true for data-mining when it began, but at a quarter century old, I believe we’re now already in the longer term.
> Ruv’s comments about them working out if you are likely having an affair are true, if you were stupid enough to leave bread crumbs lying around everywhere.
I’m not sure what ‘stupid’ or ‘bread crumbs’ mean here, DB. If you believe as police investigators do, that combing through your garbage reveals a lot about your life, then how much more information can one get from a comprehensive purchase history, tracked by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal? (How many cash purchases are you making these days?)
Use time to join that with your social networks, GPS and image-recognised movements, your emotional reactions, search-engine history, social network participation, and broad opinions, and you’re routinely providing financial institutions and other interested parties with more comprehensive and detailed information than the police usually need to successfully investigate and prosecute crimes.
Your skepticism however, is normal and understandable: our failure to recognise just how powerful this freely-donated information is, how ubiquitously collected, and how easy to distribute and reuse over and over without your considered, informed consent, is a failure of science communications and media comprehension. And whatever the need to legislate about it, we can’t do so effectively until ordinary citizens understand the whole-of-life challenges we’re facing here.
Nah. Data mining jumped the shark when it revivified “neural networks”, a technology that had already been forgotten as an expensive way to waste electrons, twenty years ago. Pseudo-statistical models you can apply when you don’t understand the problem, and can’t understand or qualify the answers.
What do you imagine the incremental information content that remains to be gleaned from a fire-hose of lunch and cat photographs is? Even of selfies in pubs?
The really interesting question is how these infrastructures will go about financing their operations as the advertiser clients gradually twig to the fact that they’re getting nothing for their money. It surprises me not at all that getting users to actually pay for the services that they like is starting to become more popular. (And good on Crikey for leading the way.)
If they have amazingly detailed models of our behaviour, wants and desires, how do you explain their inability to satisfy us, especially as there’s probably a buck or a vote in it for them?
Andrew I agree that neural networks over-promised initially, and have under-delivered to date — although they have had some successes. However machine learning has exploded since the days of AI evangelist Marvin Minsky, and although there isn’t a single, one-size-fits-all modelling technique, there are now techniques amenable to many different problems.
Your comment regarding ‘pseudostatistics’ is pejorative and ignorant. Statistical sociological predictions are key to (for example) fusty disciplines like actuarial science — they’ve been around since the 17th century, and insurance and finance companies have relied on them for centuries. Of course, psephology relies on statistics too. It’s true that stats can’t be treated as an oracle, but untrue that the use of statistics implies no underlying understanding of the model: the most frequent users of statistics are scientists and engineers.
Finally, regarding this comment:
> If they have amazingly detailed models of our behaviour, wants and desires, how do you explain their inability to satisfy us, especially as there’s probably a buck or a vote in it for them?
Your fallacy here is affirming the consequent. (If you knew enough you *could* satisfy customers, therefore not satisfying customers entails you didn’t know enough.)
As I mentioned earlier, a major business user of statistics and big data is the finance sector. Finance is at heart value network: it’s a middle-man, connecting investors with borrowers. But middle-man businesses don’t make their money from satisfying customers (cf in Freakonomics, how real estate agents sell their own homes for more than they sell client homes for). They make their money from knowing more about the market than punters buying or selling. Customer satisfaction isn’t the right measure: customer influence and prediction are.
Please note that I’m not asserting that advertisers, marketers and the like now have a comprehensive and accurate model of every individual’s behaviour. I have made two relevant claims:
1) Mining big data has made us much stronger at predicting the behaviours of smaller groups; and
2) It is incredibly hard to make a lifelong market valuation of giving away personal information forever — because its value to others and its risk to ourselves — are growing rapidly in volatile ways.
I hope that may be useful.
I do not disagree with you over the issue of data manipulation for mega-do$$h and going like lambs to Big Brother Mark’s slaughter houses for Silly Sods, but other than a fountain of frothy venting, what actual solutions are you suggesting?
(And why does the freaking Submit button NOT work in Chrome????)
What solution do I have for a capitalism finally crippled by its own innovation and now unable to exploit the human labour on which its existence depends?
Well. There are these three volumes I know.
Thanks for swift response… Please hold my hand here Helen ..
Which 3 Vols?
Lord of the Rings?
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars?
Any edition of Renew?
Marx’s Manual on overcoming insomnia (in 3 parts)?
‘(And why does the freaking Submit button NOT work in Chrome????)’
Also having trouble in Safari. Please take note those in the Crikey HQ bunker.
Also in Chrome
MODERATOR
Submit button takes 2 clicks to work on Firefox as well, I think we’re going to have to yell at the Crikey webmasters from the comments again until fixed.
Agree re Firefox – 2 clicks necessary to submit for the last week or two so why the “necessity” to change?
I only noticed by accident which is why many of my comments have not appeared as I close the window without checking.
Very irksome but why the change?
“But also of an economy in which existence itself becomes a commodity” is a profound observation that does not deserve to be undermined. It could be pointed out that “existence” is surrendered in the same or similar way as labour-power is surrendered; at least the latter is done for a wage.
While being no fan of big business I do realise that there is a limit to protecting
the public from its own stupidity and “over-protecting” the public is an act of stupidity. Those interested can read the link in the article “FTC Charges That It [FB] Deceived Consumers and “the proposed settlement” – which is not binding at law or even in the future.
“somebody has to think of a new way to keep me buying commodities
True : it is what keeps the system ticking; consider consumer credit. However with “everyone maxed-out “capital” now has a serious problem. A few can “go to the wall” but everyone – na. a tad too serious when foreclosure gets to that extent.
“(one slightly less stupid than Universal Basic Income).
The principle of UBI is that the “surplus value” has already been created Helen; viz. it is THERE. Its just a matter of distribution; not all of it (ha ha) but some of it. It WILL also keep the inherently crippled system ticking.
“This means that making my data someone else’s commodity seems like an economic oversight.” Very definitely. As you point out : (economic) existence has become a commodity.
“I am very happy for you all to exploit my “family, friendship and other personal connections” if it means I can make some money.”
There is an alternative : it is open to anyone NOT participate with data-sharing or with FB et al at all! As to regulation there ought to be a right to delete an account at wim – i.e. with only the valid password. However, I suggest, the dependence on FB is similar to that of alcohol and I conjecture the correlation to be almost unity.
Let’s just hope China isn’t pointing the way to the future on this:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion
Now Woopwoop you DO know better! As to an enquiry expressed in the article, viz., “So why have millions of people already signed up to what amounts to a trial run for a publicly endorsed government surveillance system?”
BECAUSE if one keep their toes behind the yellow line and ones head down one does not encounter any problems. Those who have signed up are, as they seem themselves, good and loyal citizens. As an aside we can thank FB, Amazon et al for this initiative. As Ruv has pointed out the surveillance (of sorts) has been in existence for decades. Now, it is just a matter of formalisation. For China and Asia in general it is NOT a matter of coercion.
As an aside, although a lot of (google) apps are banned in China their equivalents exist and are commonly used by Westerners outside of China; WeChat being, possibly, the best example.