Photo: Steve Carty
Sitting in front of the computer at home (or holding a smartphone) you could easily think that you are the centre of your own universe. Everything is at your disposal: music, calendars, addresses, videos, dictionaries, news, statistics, knowledge, gossip and, of course, advertising. You know what your friends are up to and they know the latest news about you, provided you have ‘shared’ them.
The companies that run the internet originally got rich by placing the user — that would be you and me — at the centre of their activities and concerns. But eventually they became carried away: the financial rewards that could be gained from the very people who made all this possible were too good to pass up. In the process we, the users, were downgraded to suppliers of data.
We supply the facts that are the lifeblood of their businesses, their very reason to exist. And, ironically, it is us who do a lot of that data-gathering for them. We, the customers, clients or users, actually supply essential data for all sorts of industries that are supposed to work for us: airlines, car-hire companies, utilities and most other ‘services’: we look for flights, book them ourselves, check in online, print out boarding cards — all this essentially unpaid labour. We check our bank statements online, read our own electricity meters and supply all manner of statistics by filling out form after form. We have become hamsters inside the giant internet wheel. While we pay for services and goods in the first place, with every little step in the process we generate additional profits for those that purport to serve us.
The only way you can keep yourself off the lists of millions of potential suspects is by leading the most boring life imaginable
Our appetite for information, entertainment, contacts and comfort has been big enough to make us enter this Faustian bargain, at least while there seems no viable alternative. No one is really happy with the situation: A 2012 Harris Research report showed that only eight per cent of American citizens consider social media trustworthy and honest. They thought as little of them as they did
of the old industries such as tobacco, oil, health care and telecommunications. American teenagers are leaving Facebook in droves and now use other media which they consider more trustworthy — for the time being, at least.
The IT oligarchs of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al caved in to the National Security Agency’s demands all too readily. They didn’t put up a fight when they were asked to hand over their users’ data, nor did they inform the users. While we shall never know the whole extent of what the NSA and other secret services know about us or what they intend to do with that knowledge, the next big wheel is being put into motion: The Internet of Things. Our thermostats, light bulbs, cars, front doors, kettles, toasters, fridges, even our sunglasses and watches, will have an IP number and be connected to the internet, always and everywhere. It may be smart and even practical to check and set the temperature of your house remotely or switch on the lights as you approach the door; just be aware that your movements, habits and plans will be known to everyone who gets access to a server, legally or illegally. And that line has already become blurry.
When the FBI was looking for Iranian terrorists, it checked the customer data of shops selling oriental food. Once your fridge sends out its own shopping list, as promised by the manufacturers, that won’t even be necessary. Big Data will compose a profile of you from everything you do and own. And Big Data has no interest in the why, it just compiles facts. Some computer code will then decide whether buying hummus makes you a potential terrorist.
So don’t turn on your lights at unusual times, restrict your diet to what most in your neighbourhood eats, don’t travel to exotic places and don’t read literature in foreign languages. The only way you can keep yourself off the lists of millions of potential suspects, is by leading the most boring life imaginable. Big Data is as prejudiced as the managers who instruct the nerds who write the code. Spanners in the works are our only hope of ever getting a look in. Some day we may end up giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a whistleblower.
