One should imagine data like a bottle of ink whose contents are poured into a lake. It flows everywhere. Now how do you put the ink back in the bottle? Or at least organize it so that it only flows to certain places in the lake? This lyrical metaphor was penned by a group of privacy officers at the meta corporation (Facebook et al.) The ink, in this metaphor, is the myriad of user data that the corporation collects every day from the users of its apps and platforms. The lake is the world.
The assessment of the situation was leaked to the public at the end of April. It gets a bit more specific later in the document. It does not have an adequate level of control and accountability over how its systems use data, and therefore cannot make “controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘We will not use data set X for purpose Y'”.
The data will be used to find out who is having an abortion
Considering that it is an admission of quite a total failure, the response was surprisingly low. Of course, this is often the case when privacy catastrophes become known. Although people are aware that they are dealing with a problem that is more than just theoretical, this knowledge only leads to concrete action in the rarest of cases. A bit of cognitive dissonance is manageable when you’re about to assemble a shabby-chic shelf and the spirit level app requires full access to your phone. You can’t take care of everything, can you?
An example from last week shows how quickly things can become concrete. As the US Supreme Court appears to be working to overturn a landmark decision on abortion rights, it has emerged that smartphone user data is being used profitably to identify women seeking abortions. Like Tech Magazine motherboard reports, until recently it was possible to buy whereabouts information from data broker Safegraph, which gives insight into which groups of people attended abortion clinics. From the data sets offered for a few hundred US dollars, it could be concluded “where the visitor groups came from, how long they stayed there and where they went afterwards”.
On Twitter, women report that they get scared
GPS data is by no means the only means. Cases have already been reported in the recent past in which pregnancies were correctly identified through internet searches alone – and the affected users were shown ads for baby clothes even before they even made the pregnancy public. However, if advertisers can predict who has been pregnant, then arguably they can also predict who is no longer pregnant or who should be pregnant, and provide that information to those who are willing to pay for that information.
The advertising delivery technology commonly used on the Internet is a highly potent tool for collecting and combining location data, search terms and past behavior in order to find people based on their supposed needs and distress. It is only a matter of time and motivation before this machinery is used to pressure people in ways other than encouraging them to consume.
On Twitter, women report that they get scared. Solidarity addresses alternate with messages to delete corresponding apps for cycle tracking as soon as possible. But, going back to engineering prose, the ink has already spilled in the lake. If previously permitted actions are suddenly declared illegal and there is an additional incentive to retrospectively prosecute the persons classified as criminals, all data – past, present and future – is marketed and evaluated. After all, in the digital context, almost all of our daily social actions are infested with parasitic advertising technology. It is the foundation of an industry in which the lives and bodies of users are nothing more than raw material for their own value chains.