Free means YOU are the product.

Free is such a good deal.

Facebook is free. Google searches are free. You can upload videos to YouTube for Free. Twitter is Free.

That's all very nice.

But are the large and powerful technology firms killing our democracy?

Both left and right complain. The left suspects that affirmation algorithms, Republican partisans, conspiracy kooks, and possibly Russian influencers create an echo chamber of people who believe things that are demonstrably untrue and dangerous to our democracy. The political right suspects that efforts to label Trump's tweets and Facebook posts as "disputed," and then banning him altogether for spreading false conspiracy claims, constitutes a shocking affront to the free exchange of ideas in a democracy.

Today's Guest Post continues looking at how we got to a place where technology companies are the most valuable companies in the world, and the most contentious, and perhaps the most dangerous.

John Coster currently leads technology strategy and innovation teams at a large wireless telecommunications company. Over his 40-year career, he oversaw the design and construction projects for very large energy users, including the largest technology firms.

Guest Post by John Coster

In 2002, when I managed a risk management group for Microsoft, we were subject to an initiative launched by Bill Gates called Trustworthy Computing or TwC.   Microsoft had been under pressure by businesses and government to make their software more secure.  The four pillars were, Security, Privacy, Reliability, and Business Integrity.

Coster

Protecting personally identifiable information or PII was, and remains a big deal in things like banking, or those pesky HIPAA forms you need to read and sign at the doctor’s office.  The thought was that with the emergence of On-Line everything, developers and customers would choose a company that was committed to respecting and securing privacy. It was a business decision. The TwC training was thorough and rigorous.

 

Back then the idea of social media was just emerging. Facebook had just started and MySpace had yet to peak. That anyone would voluntarily broadcast anything and everything about themselves to the world seemed absurd to many of us who were raised reading Orwell’s 1984. But it was free, and anyone who sought “friends” could create real or imagined identity and build a sense of self-worth on this new platform. Lack of privacy was a feature, not a defect, as they say.

 

In 2007 when the first iPhone was launched, you could download 300 applications from the Apple Store. Within 36 months the number was over 500,000. They were pitched as ways to entertain, inform, and connect people. However, the real intent of their design is to collect data about what you like, who you know and who knows you, where you live, where you go and who else goes there, when and how often, and what you believe. It archives your life in real-time. But it’s not like Big Tech has some prurient interest in you personally; it’s just their business model. That data can be monetized and we are the product. Of the nearly 2 million Apple applications now available, 92% are free. With Android it is 96%.

But nothing is free of course. The economics of social media were fully exposed with the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook in 2018.  It confirmed what we already knew.  We found that we trade privacy for convenience, and Facebook makes billions using our personal data to sell advertisements to us based on algorithms that have learned our preferences. They monetize and manipulate our deepest desires, and we keep coming back for more.

 

Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School argues that social media companies are destroying democracy, and only democracy can stop it. Click: NY Times   In what she terms surveillance capitalism, seemingly harmless social media companies morphed into surveillance empires with powerful tools to manipulate us. The social media giants would have us believe that their platforms help us connect with others and are merely promoting First Amendment rights. But they are gaslighting us. They functionally assert ownership rights over our personal information.

Zuboff compares our time to the early era of industrialization when owners had all the power. She believes we have ceded our power to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the right to define our social order. She says it’s time to take it back. 

 

What can be done? Both Zuboff and Ezra Gottheil in yesterday's post here agree that anti-trust law is the wrong approach for the wrong century. There has been lots of debate about getting people to boycott these platforms but what are the chances, with nearly 50% of the world’s population using social media and almost 3 billion of those on Facebook alone?  An entire generation has normalized their lives around this phenomenon.

The other option is legislation, and the big idea on the table today is to revisit Article 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. It creates a shield for Big Tech that allows them to be immune from liability of what is published on their platforms. A 2019 Appeals court ruling in Facebook’s favor supported that view. Removing those protections would be a reckoning for Big Tech, because it would dismantle their entire business model. It would damage the way the internet works and punch a big hole in the economy. The resulting upheaval would anger consumers and investors. Politicians would feel the brunt from both sides,  so I find it hard to believe we’ll see any big changes.