The Illusion of Digital Freedom
Tech giants are getting rich off of our personal data. How can we take back control?
Written by: Blake Allen
Black Twitter is a prime example of the possibilities that arise when the digital world collides with the physical. Using a handful of platforms, Black people have managed to create a blueprint for how social media can serve society, how we can use it to affect social, political and economic dimensions. But if we have the blueprint, shouldn’t we be protecting it? Shouldn’t we be searching for ways to use it to our own advantage? If we don’t, we are at risk of losing it to a system eagerly looking for ways to expand and replicate itself. A system that has exploited us for centuries and can only operate by doing so.
With the onset of the quarantine, I, like so many others, have had to rely on unemployment. However, for the first time in my life with nowhere to go, hardly anything to spend money on, and a steady stream of income — which, to be quite frank, is much more of a living wage than anything I’ve made previously — I have run up a decent amount of savings. So, I thought, what better way to make my savings stretch than to begin investing now while the stock prices are down and my savings account is up?
After lots of research and a little bit of advice, I found that my best course of action was to set up a Roth IRA for myself and use the account to establish an Index Mutual Fund — how these accounts function is still mostly an enigma to me. However, what I am sure about is what I’m investing in: the top 500 companies on the American stock exchange. And it is no surprise who’s at the top of the top 500: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Visa just to name a few.
But what was more interesting was the industry that had the highest percentage in my portfolio — information technology. This industry takes up over 25% of my portfolio, ten percent more than the second leading industry, healthcare. How is it that these companies have become so valuable in such a small amount of time, leading over industries that have been around for much longer?
According to Google, information technology “is the study or use of systems (especially computers and telecommunications) for storing, retrieving, and sending information.” Among the leading information technology companies are Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, with lesser companies being Twitter and Facebook (which owns Instagram). The products and platforms these companies produce are used by billions of people globally everyday. Their specialty is “storing, retrieving and sending information,” and a lot of that information is our information. Our likes, our shares, our posts and reposts, our internet searches, purchases, apps, photos and personal information. With each login, click, share or purchase, we cultivate our own technological personas — our own data — to give to whichever platform or website attracts us. And what do these platforms do with our data? They sell it.
““How is it that these companies can sell our data, increasing their value exponentially, while we receive nothing, or worse?””
Third party data brokers legally buy our private information. This means they can access our click history, date of birth, bank account information, purchase history, address and phone number from IT companies in order to sell it to other IT companies in an effort to “merge data sources and get a complete profile of people.” The biggest scandal to date regarding this phenomenon is the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. During the 2016 election cycle, Cambridge Analytica, owned primarily by big-time right wing donor Robert Mercer, bought people’s personal data from Facebook and allowed the Trump Campaign to use it to craft voter profiles to ensure a victory. Although it is legal in most states for these third-party data brokers to exist, the way the Trump Administration obtained this data was nefarious. But it is no surprise that these companies are owned by the wealthiest, who rarely keep the public’s well-being in mind. When signing up for an account with these platforms or visiting a webpage, you may see a pop-up for or be prompted to sign a privacy policy, but this does not protect you from these companies selling the data that you willingly give to them — either through a simple click on a shirt you like or by inputting your information to build your account. And they do not even have to tell us who they are selling our data to.
How is it that these companies can sell our data, increasing their value exponentially, while we receive nothing, or worse? It’s quite clear that the tangible wealth the owners and investors of these companies receive proves that our activity online has moved far beyond it being “just the internet.” As our digital presence becomes more entwined with our virtual reality, it is quite unsettling to know that the essence of who we are can be so easily converted into economic capital — capital most of us never see. And it goes beyond economic capital. Researchers from all backgrounds harvest data, but they must go through the Institutional Review Board and obtain consent through properly informing users and participants. How is it that our private, personal information can be sold without our consent by these tech companies, though? This sounded all too familiar to me.
Read more like this in The Money & Power Issue of our Journal
From learning when to scale back your budget to visualizing federal reparations, the Money & Power Issue tells the real story of Black wealth (or lack thereof) and reimagines a Black existence in America that imbues us with agency and perspective.
The history of this country is riddled with a legacy of denied consent: the kidnapping of Africans and their life-long, intergenerational enslavement; the theft of land from Native Americans and their genocide and internment; the physical, emotional and sexual abuse that still runs rampant through these communities at the hands of white supremacists, and so many other injustices. All of these transgressions produced with the removal of consent and power and done in the name of expanding capital. And as we build our new world, an online world, it seems as though we are replicating this history of denied consent. Already we see how these companies are using the internet and our data to oppress us, both online and off. In addition to skewing political elections and stealing economic capital, the data they collect from us without our consent can be used to deny us insurance; target and harass protesters, activists and sex workers; and police our private online interactions. Now that we are inhabiting a constantly-evolving reality, we must know how to protect it from the people who would like to use it to further nefarious purposes. We must know how to use it to serve us, to create a model of how we believe the world should work. Although it is legal for these companies to buy and sell our data without our full knowledge, that does not make it ethical and it certainly does not make it equitable; there is no equity in stealing a person’s opportunities or identity and using it against them.
So, what are the alternatives? Do we attempt to forego participation and risk social and economic exile? Can we buy back a piece of ourselves through long-term investments in the same companies that take our data without our permission? Is there true digital freedom if we are not told how much our data is worth or who is allowed to have access to it? Some people suggest we begin paying for access to the platforms we use so that they do not have to turn to these third-party data brokers for funding. Maybe we can create and support laws that protect our information and make it harder for these brokers to so easily collect our data. Or, we can even start initiatives to demand transparency from those IT companies and try to get our data back, like Vermont has done. For now, we have the ability to do things like reach out to individual brokers in order to remove yourself from a company’s database or file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission which penalizes credit agencies and data brokers for unfair or unlawful behavior. You can look at a more extensive list of actions to take and some of the data brokers who are available for direct contact here — some of these actions are free and some of them cost money. Of all the things we can or could do, it seems as though most of our options will cost us directly. Paying for access directly to the platforms we value may prove to be a better path towards having a say in how our data is stored and distributed.
Black women had already begun to lead a counter-movement with #YourSlipIsShowing back in 2014. The hashtag exposed blackfishing bots mining our cultural data and disturbing our mental peace in order to skew the 2016 election. The digital reality we want to sculpt and inhabit is still within our domain. Protecting our virtual world from the ills of our physical reality is now part of the process. But should we be successful, maybe our physical world will begin to reflect what we model digitally, and the illusion of differentiation will fade away as we take control.
