A Breach in Our Trust

Ankush Vangari / Spring 2020

With technology taking over everyone’s lives, online privacy is starting to get more important than ever. Many are unaware of the underlying problems of technology because they were designed to make it hard for users to understand it. I think it is important for everyone to look around and analyze the system we live in. The system is not perfect and the only way we can progress as a society is to not accept the current system and demand changes.

We live in a society where everyone is sharing intimate details about themselves online freely with no concern. People post information, pictures, and videos of themselves without thinking of the potential harm it can bring to them. Individuals can stalk you, steal your identity, gain access to your bank accounts, and so much more. We see this happen all the time, but people have gotten better in finding a line between knowing what to post and not what to post. Something that people do not seem to understand is the amount of mass surveillance and data that is being gathered not by a specific individual, but by big companies and the government. There has been a breach in our trust and privacy and there needs to be more awareness and changes.

The best example of this is Cambridge Analytica. The company claimed to have 5,000 data points on every American. Facebook had made it too easy for the company to gather information about one’s profile, allowing massive data mining to be undertaken. Cambridge Analytica had worked on Project Alamo, which was Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential advertising campaign. Trump spent over $1 million a day utilizing the massive data that Cambridge Analytica had on American voters to provide personalized advertising. This is called psychographic profiling which gave Trump the ability to influence people on Facebook and other platforms through targeted ads to get you to vote for him. Cambridge Analytica had 5,000 data points on an individual that mostly came from information from Facebook. For example, your post history, likes, searches, friends, and so much more. Other data was also gathered from other platforms like Google and Amazon. Having this much intimate information on a person allows the company to predict your behavior and likings. Smart people have spent their careers learning from this data and finding ways to market ads in an effective manner. With this much data on you, the company will know exactly how to influence people. They start to target individuals they believe who are easily influenced and send them personalized videos. They would prioritize individuals in swing states to maximize election effectiveness. They can start sending you videos that show how bad of a candidate Hillary is or how good Trump is. They send videos that provoke a very specific reaction from you. You may think you are numb to ads, but when these ads are bombarded in your face every day, you will subconsciously be influenced. Trump had spent over $250 million on advertising mainly on Facebook by utilizing the data from Cambridge Analytica to gain major support from the country. Data is more powerful than people think and companies like Cambridge Analytica have the power to sway the presidential election since there are no laws enforced against it. The power they hold is immensely danger because they are using our data for their private gain rather than common good.

This is an issue that has plagued society for centuries. To understand the full effect and societal problem that is currently happening with privacy, we must first understand the deeper problem. Those in power are exploiting the masses for their own private interests. In the past, when territories were ruled by Kings, the people had absolutely no privacy. There was no such thing as private domains or private property as it all belonged to the King. Kings exploited this power by hoarding resources from the land at the expense of the people’s labor. People tend to have trust that authorities will do the right thing, but time after time we see them break this trust. Kings could go to anyone’s house freely and take whatever they want or reprimand people as they wish. There were no checks and balances, so there was no one to stop them.

America fought a revolution to create a better system of democracy that included privacy. This revolution fought for independence to create a system without Kings and tyranny. They wanted to shift the system from authorities exploiting the masses for private interests to authorities caring about the common good. They freed the states and spread the power among various government branches and the general public. People started to trust those in power, but it was not soon after where the same issue comes back to life by different means.

Howard Zinn in Robber Barons and Rebels outlines this historical problem of corrupt corporations. These people were named Robber Barons because of the immense greed and power they possessed. The railroad industry started evolving which provided a lot of economic benefit as railroads across the nations started getting connected. Technologies would be pushed to cut the time in railroad production and connecting popular routes. Later, the same thing happened with oil. These turned into huge markets, but only a few companies had a monopoly on the market. They became so wealthy that they could crush the competition by bribing them or selling lower to gain the market. After they have no more competition, they can increase the prices and the people would have no one else to turn to for basic commodities. People in the past pushed technology to speed up the process of getting metal and oil to sell at a faster rate. They used natural resources and labor of the masses to benefit themselves at the expense of the majority. These private companies only have private interests and not the public’s interest. Bribing politicians is a problem going on for decades where corrupt government adhere to major corporations for personal benefit.

This is the problem of neoliberalism where the rich gain power through a free market. In the past, people have used oil as a commodity to build large businesses and power. Noam Chomsky showed that financial firms are moving money around in complicated ways but provide no value to the public. We live in a thing-oriented society that runs on economic benefit, with no disregard to the humans suffering. This economic benefit usually entails the rich getter richer and the poor getting poorer. It appears that those with the most money have the most power, which is something that we need to fight hard to combat. Those who are rich play by a set of rules.

Coming back to the modern era, laws have put in place to stop people like the Robber Barons from bribing companies to take over the market. However, we see companies like Amazon still achieving a similar end goal going around many of the laws. Amazon sets predatory pricing to make sure that they are selling items lower than everyone else on the market even if that means they are taking a hit. They have other services like AWS that makes them most of their money, so they can afford taking a hit in the marketplace. They, however, use this as leverage to not pay taxes because they state that they are technically in debt. Amazon is now taking over the entire market and will have the power to do anything with their products and customers will have nowhere else to go to.

Technology and the Internet has brought new markets and new monopolies that run by a separate set of rules as the government has not caught up in regulating it properly. We see in the physical world that the government cannot go inside your house or car or any of your private property without your permission or a warrant. It was very important that they had a warrant and a strong reason for the need to invade an individual’s privacy. Warrants allowed for governments to still go through private property if there was a strong suspicion of criminal activity. This allowed normal law-abiding citizens to live in comfort that they had rights to their privacy.

All of this changed after 9/11. A program called “Stellar Wind” rose which gave the NSA the freedom to conduct mass surveillance without the need for a warrant to look for links with al-Qaeda. Now, the NSA has the freedom to listen in on your phone calls, private messages, emails, private content, and so much more. Anything the NSA could monitor, was monitoring as they got the permission to do so by the government. This by itself is already unconstitutional as it goes against many amendments, including the fourth, ninth, and thirteenth to name a few. They were able to get away with this program stating that it is part of the Patriot Act and will help obstruct terrorism. The problem is that the entire program is conducted in secrecy, so no one was checking to see if their actions were ethical. They were trusted to be ethical with the data they were accessing. This, however, ultimately changed our Constitutional rights without the public voting. The Congress could not even learn any of the program’s details. Everything was done in secrecy causing our system to fail us. They looked to see if there was any terrorism, but they did not find much. They were able to do this for so long that they got comfortable and started to use the program to spy on individuals for personal gain.

But how are they able to get everyone’s private information like emails? If authorities need a warrant to go through our private property, why do they not need one to go through our private data? The answer to this leads another huge issue we see in society that hurts online privacy. Many companies save any and all information about you. For example, Facebook openly stores everyone’s private messages, likes, profile information and can access them freely. Google has massive information on the public as they have data on all your emails, search history, google drive files, and even your entire web history from Chrome. These companies have information about nearly your entire intimate life that is being sold to the government and other companies to utilize.     

How are companies able to get away with this? The government has not been able to catch up to technology and make proper laws to regulate it. Even with the right laws, companies make the terms of service very long and complicated that it is impossible to read. The reason for that is because if you do read it and understand it, you will be shocked. All of your private messages, posts, likes, nearly everything that you do online is being collected and used against you. None of these services are keeping your data private. The reason why Facebook, Google, and other services are free is because you are the product. You provide them intimate information about you that they can sell because that data is very powerful in advertising. “If you are not paying for a product, you are the product”.  These companies make it difficult for people to understand what they are doing, so many do not even know that their data is being used like this.

What are some solutions to this? There needs to be some sort of regulation over how personal data is being used. The government does not understand the technology at all and are not creating proper laws to protect the public. There needs to be more technology experts in government to be able to educate and propose the right laws. It would help a lot if the government issued laws that stopped companies from collecting certain data and using data in nefarious ways. Companies should be forced to be more transparent in their actions. However, companies will get around these restriction by moving their service to another country with less strict laws or creating ghost profiles where they say that your information is anonymous, but it can be indirectly linked back to you. We need to be able to specify a clear line where the use of this data is not ethical. We need laws in place to stop political campaigns from utilizing this data. Personally, I think the collection and selling of our data is already unethical, but that is how these companies are able to provide free services. If companies make so much money off of our data, perhaps we should get a cut of the money. The real problem, however, is how this data is being used. Laws need to intervene companies that use this data in political swinging to push their own agenda and to stop politicians from taking bribes. I think the government should be motivated to do this because they are being used as a tool for companies to get the laws they want in place and the people they want in power. Authorities should not have the power to conduct mass surveillance as people will have no privacy and will fear that authorities will misuse this power.

All of these problems boil down to the underlying problem of tyranny. We see too often those in power exploiting the masses for private gain instead of thinking about the common good. Even when we make laws against the misuse of power, we still see authorities and corrupt corporations go around these laws or even against these laws with no consequences. Today, data mining is the new oil mining as it is currently the most valuable commodity to sell. When we look at the pendulum chart, we see that we swung forward with the amazing advances in technology, but we are swinging back as we are misusing these technologies. As people get more and more rich and powerful, we will soon reach a breaking point where we could see another revolution take place.