I have been following the social media brouhaha around the new WhatsApp privacy laws that will see the application share user information, including billing information and some consumer messages with Facebook.
People are threatening to leave WhatsApp for Telegram and other supposedly “safe” sites, arguing that they don't want to be under surveillance. The sad reality that they don't understand is that the minute they use Google search engine or sign up for Gmail, Facebook, or any social media accounts, they already sign over this information that they believe has been protected all along.
These sites have been mining data from users for many years. But it is not them alone – our smartphones, even without applications on them, are an entire data repository which is available to companies. It is for this reason that under certain circumstances, forensic specialists can extract information we even delete on our phones – including messages.
The extent of the problem is articulated in Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power". It looks at how the age of information has birthed a new economic order that "claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales". This parasitic economic logic uses data from individuals to manipulate not only their economic choices in terms of what they buy, but their political choices too. It’s done using mined data to manipulate their worldview to predict and at times even influence outcomes.
A few years ago, Cambridge Analytica was exposed for having mined Facebook user data to influence election outcomes in the US. Though Facebook was fined $5-billion by the US government, the impact on data privacy and democracy itself has still not been studied with the depth it demands. With the advent of the information age, which has seen the evolution of economies from being industry-based to being knowledge-based, capitalist accumulation too has evolved beyond the extraction of conventional natural resources such as minerals, to the extraction of data, which is a trillion-dollar industry.
Professor Zuboff explains how machine intelligence is the manufacturing process of the information age, and that its output is traded in the behavioural future markets for more than just the bettering of the user experience. It is traded too for the very architecture of human consumer subjects who feed the insatiable hunger of the market. In essence, how and where we spend our money is significantly influenced by the digital experience constructed for us by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon through their use of algorithms that effectively direct our economic and political choices with the use of data mined from us through our use of such services.
Of great concern is that there is little supervision by governments and users themselves, particularly in developing countries where digital security laws are elementary, digital infrastructure is not advanced and the information and digital gap is colossal – thus, the exploitation of consumers even more pronounced. The implications for personal security are enormous.
Fundamentally, what must be of concern to users is not only the exploitation of their economic and political choices, but also the amount of power that companies such as Google have. Governments are not supervising them, and neither are users. Who then, monitors these companies? Or as the Latin phrase goes: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guards?
Importantly, what are the implications for personal and even national sovereignties when companies like Google and Facebook go unchecked with power so infinite as to observe and control consumer behaviour? The issue is much bigger than just leaving WhatsApp.
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