Gringo View: It’s high time to get our data back

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Almost every second of every day, mostly without our knowledge or consent, mega-data about each of us flies at giga speed around the digital universe, keeping track of where we are, what we are doing, what we like (and dislike), how we spend our money, what we read or watch, our vital signs and much, much more. Should we be complacently letting it happen?

According to the recently and belatedly created National Data Protection Authority, a major data ‘leak’ recently exposed more than 102 million Brazilian consumers whose data is almost certainly already being sold on the deep web. It is our data and unfortunately not an unusual occurrence. It’s past time we were up in arms about it.

For most of us, the illusion of privacy has long since ceased to exist. Like it or not, each of us has become like raindrops of digital data, suspended out there in the cyber cloud waiting to be summoned by an anonymous algorithm to fall and nourish some product or service purveyor’s bottom line or inform some inquisitor’s curiosity about us or people like us, or worse, feed us intentionally true or fake information to influence our behavior and ideas.

We can yell! “Stop this digital merry go round, I want to get off”. But its damned near impossible without choosing permanent hibernation. After 9/11, when the CIA outlined the agency’s technology mission “to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” the perceived need for security in the US and abroad quickly overtook what were then dominant commercial motives. We and our data were all dumped headfirst into what has been coined a big bucket of ‘surveillance capitalism’.

The ’capitalism’ part of it has some distinct advantages. The ‘surveillance’ part less so.

Optimists among us can embrace the commercial advantages of which there are many. The proliferation of data about us paves the ease and facility with which we have been able to acquire and have delivered, virus-free to our front doors, the goods, and services many of us have wanted and needed during the pandemic. There is no question that the existence of the data and the networks to manipulate it have made personal interactions, however pleasurable, less essential and made a significant contribution to lessening the spread of Covid-19.

It seems only fair to provide this disclaimer here.

When I came to live in Brazil more than two decades ago, it was at the invitation of the publishing giant, Grupo Abril and I was charged with building what we called ‘a consumer marketing database’. I had, for most of my career, been actively involved in the legal capture and use of consumer data for the commercial purpose of direct and data-driven marketing, identifying potential consumer needs and making offers of merchandise and/or services to fulfill those needs.

Our objective at Abril was to develop subscriptions, a parallel and additional distribution channel to bancas for our published products, to lower our prices through larger circulations and to enhance our relationship with readers. I proudly remember being given a tour of the new ‘data center’ by Abril’s owner and CEO, Roberto Civita, and admiring all the IBM cabinets (mostly empty at the time) awaiting the data we were going to acquire. And we did acquire it; legally and lots of it.

Over these years, with an increasing sense of embarrassment, I have anxiously watched the explosion in the mostly unrestricted collection and use of ‘big data’ for all manner of things. I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say this has caused this gringo a heightened level of concern.

I marvel at Waze’s effortless and gentle ability to keep me from getting hopelessly lost in traffic (not to mention avoiding the never-sleeping eyes of the speed cameras). Being able to pay my parking fees instantly and without searching for coins and a parking meter is nothing less than a gift from the digital gods. Less marvelous is that as soon as I get out of the car, I am bombarded with promotions from the stores I’m about to pass, stores which obviously know where I am and all about what I just might want/need to acquire. It’s annoying but hardly life-threatening.

Of course, I could just switch off my phone. In my desire for privacy though, I might miss some world-shaking communication. One way or the other, it is no big deal.

What is an excessively big deal, though, is the ways that we have been unwittingly and seductively sucked into the deeper depths of the digital world and how our personal data has been purloined from us. Because we let them use it, because we checked unread the microscopic ‘permission’ box when we downloaded something, it is no longer ours; it has become theirs. Wake up my friends. This is a growing and serious concern.

Shoshana Zuboff writing in the New York Times argues that the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal; “… riveted the world’s attention on Facebook in a new way, offering a window for bold change. The public began to grasp that Facebook’s political advertising business is a way to rent the company’s suite of capabilities to microtarget users, manipulate them and sow epistemic chaos, pivoting the whole machine just a few degrees from commercial to political objectives.

We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is the fight for the soul of our information civilization.“

If there is any certainty, it is that we cannot turn back the digital clock or end the surveillance.

What we must do is to raise our levels of awareness and not just bask in the benefits of this information civilization uncritically, especially when it comes to political advertising and ‘news’.

Perhaps the time has come (or is overdue) to truly rein in the power of the Facebooks, Googles and other major social media platforms. Perhaps we could take their algorithms apart and each one of us decide just what elements of our data they may hold or use. Perhaps social media should be regulation compelled to offer a form of paid subscriptions to their service that is free of collected data. Perhaps some Silicon Valley genius will invent a magic bullet to eliminate the problem.

These are extremely tricky questions. But they demand to be addressed before our individual identities become nothing more than bits of someone else’s data. If we the users don’t do something about it, no one will.