One-Way Mirror: Breaching Privacy for the Sake of Personalization
Less than nine years ago, I received my first smartphone. No flipping needed, no spending an eternity to text, and most importantly, no longer was I ostracized for my inability to meet my peers on the virtual playgrounds of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. One year later, my parents gifted me a personal laptop. At the time, they nor I could recognize how these gifts marked just one instance of a sweeping cultural shift toward the digital age.
The delights of online connectivity cannot be overstated; the ability to watch childhood shows on demand and talk to friends over scarily detailed video-chat has made entertainment and community easy to find. Tech innovations have made shopping and identifying interests a breeze as consumers are accustomed to personalized content on every page they view. But with such swift advancement comes expected trade-offs, and thus the uglier sides of the Internet reveal themselves.
The hyper-personalization and near-instant adaptation to our desires uncovers the remarkable capability of companies like Google to craft and refine digital profiles for every user. Each profile is an algorithmic aggregation of everything that defines you based on a computer’s records of your search history, purchases, and more. Thankfully, we have some governance over these profiles; Google allows for the viewing, changing and removal of interest categories and demographic information. You can even turn off the data collection entirely, but regardless, the breadth of data is staggering and raises new questions. Why am I only learning about this now when companies like Google and Facebook have looked over my shoulder for almost a decade of Internet use? How powerful and personal is this data? How much has my Internet privacy eroded…or even how much did I have to begin with?
Professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School asked these same questions while authoring her book Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff has been critically analyzing the Internet and its economic implications since the early 2000s. During a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, she explains how her years of research have culminated in a message of warning and hope.
Image from Electronic Frontier Foundation
Zuboff describes the relationship between data collectors, users and the Internet as being a one-way mirror. The user interacts with a digital projection of themself, but massive data companies have the privilege of gathering information without the user knowing too much about what is behind the mirror. Zuboff’s concern is the disparity between what happens behind the wall and what is being projected. The normalization of personalization has created a hugely profitable industry that unequivocally relies on masses of data and more complex processes to monetize that data. It is a cycle that will always require better, more specific data, which entails less and less privacy for users. Zuboff points to numerous groundbreaking reports of dangerous data misuse and server hacks that unleash a flood of peoples’ sensitive data. Some will argue that predicting user behavior and security risks are an inevitable consequence of the Internet era, but Zuboff says that it is a consequence of unregulated capitalist exploitation, and it is not inevitable.
Marketing, advertising, and many industries rely on consumer data to make informed decisions about how and where to invest money. Consumer profiles allow brands to thoroughly connect with communities who share their interests by filtering out the people who are connected to a different area. These profiles are transformative; they offer a real way for people to construct a digital reality that features all the latest opportunities relating to the things they love. Should that possibility go away? In my opinion, no – but we must be empowered to make that decision for ourselves.
Trust is built upon a balance between giving and taking. A one-way mirror cannot support a two-way relationship – it will always take more than it gives. But symbiotic connections are the foundation of successful marketing. Data has been the Internet’s modernizing breakthrough, but like all other innovations, it requires legal boundaries that emphasize personal choice rather than data maximization.
Best of all, we have ample opportunity to change the Internet’s trajectory through legislation and consumer activism. Zuboff cites research that shows when users are informed about a company’s data misuse, they will find an alternative. Well, we do know; the news is out there, and each of us must make a conscious change. We must also raise our voices in support for the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (H.R. 8152), which is a bipartisan law introduced to Congress in June. Consumer privacy in the digital era has momentum, and so long as we stay rooted in our values and act, there is hope.