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Who’s Winning Our Tugs-of-War Over On-Line Privacy & Autonomy?

February 1, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We know that our on-line privacy and autonomy (or freedom from outside control) are threatened in two, particularly alarming ways today. There are the undisclosed privacy invasions that occur from our on-line activities and the loss of opportunities where we can speak our minds without censorship.

These alarm bells ring because of the dominance of on-line social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and text-based exchanges like What’s App and the other instant messaging services—most of which barely existed a decade ago. With unprecedented speed, they’ve become the town squares of modern life where we meet, talk, shop, learn, voice opinions and engage politically. But as ubiquitous and essential as they’ve become, their costs to vital zones of personal privacy and autonomy have caused a significant backlash, and this past week we got an important preview of where this backlash is likely to take us.

Privacy advocates worry about the harmful consequences when personal data is extracted from users of these platforms and services. They say our own data is being used “against us” to influence what we buy (the targeted ads that we see and don’t see), manipulate our politics (increasing our emotional engagement by showing us increasingly polarizing content), and exert control over our social behavior (by enabling data-gathering agencies like the police, FBI or NSA). Privacy advocates are also offended that third parties are monetizing personal data “that belongs to us” in ways that we never agreed to, amounting to a kind of theft of our personal property by unauthorized strangers.

For their part, censorship opponents decry content monitors who can bar particular statements or even participation on dominant platforms altogether for arbitrary and biased reasons. When deprived of the full use of our most powerful channels of mass communication, they argue that their right to peaceably assemble is being eviscerated by what they experience as “a culture war” against them. 

Both groups say they have a privacy right to be left alone and act autonomously on-line: to make choices and decisions for themselves without undue influence from outsiders; to be free from ceaseless monitoring, profiling and surveillance; to be able to speak their minds without the threat of “silencing;” and, “to gather” for any lawful purpose without harassment. 

So how are these tugs-or-war over two of our most basic rights going?

This past week provided some important indications.

This week’s contest over on-line privacy pit tech giant Apple against rivals with business models that depend upon selling their users’ data to advertisers and other third parties—most prominently, Facebook and Google.

Apple announced this week that it would immediately start offering its leading smartphone users additional privacy protections. One relates to its dominant App Store and developers like Facebook, Google and the thousands of other companies that sell their apps (or platform interfaces) to iPhone users.

Going forward—on what Apple chief Tim Cook calls “a privacy nutrition label”—every app that the company offers for installation on its phones will need to share its data collection and privacy practices before purchase in ways that Apple will ensure “every user can understand and act on.” Instead of reading (and then ignoring) multiple pages of legalese, for the first time every new Twitter or YouTube user for example, will be able through their iPhones to either “opt-in” or refuse an app’s data collection practices after reading plain language that describes the personal data that will be collected and what will be done with it. In a similar vein, iPhone users will gain a second advantage over apps that have already been installed on their phones. With new App Tracking Transparency, iPhone users will be able to control how each app is gathering and sharing their personal data. For every application on your iPhone, you can now choose whether a Facebook or Google has access to your personal data or not.

While teeing up these new privacy initiatives at an industry conference this week, Apple chief Tim Cook was sharply critical of companies that take our personal data for profit, citing several of the real world consequences when they do so. I quote at length from his remarks last Thursday because I enjoyed hearing someone of Cook’s stature speaking to these issues so pointedly, and thought you might too:

A little more than two years ago…I spoke in Brussels about the emergence of a data-industrial complex… At that gathering we asked ourselves: “what kind of world do we want to live in?” Two years later, we should now take a hard look at how we’ve answered that question. 

The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been. 

And it has never been so clear how it degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence.

As I’ve said before, ‘if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.’….

Together, we must send a universal, humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated….

At Apple…, [w]e have worked to not only deepen our own core privacy principles, but to create ripples of positive change across the industry as a whole. 

We’ve spoken out, time and again, for strong encryption without backdoors, recognizing that security is the foundation of privacy. 

We’ve set new industry standards for data minimization, user control and on-device processing for everything from location data to your contacts and photos. 

At the same time that we’ve led the way in features that keep you healthy and well, we’ve made sure that technologies like a blood-oxygen sensor and an ECG come with peace of mind that your health data stays yours.

And, last but not least, we are deploying powerful, new requirements to advance user privacy throughout the App Store ecosystem…. 

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom. 

If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform….

At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

Too many are still asking the question, “how much can we get away with?,” when they need to be asking, “what are the consequences?” What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of their high rates of engagement? What are the consequences of not just tolerating, but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations? What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?….

[N]o one needs to trade away the rights of their users to deliver a great product. 

With its new “data nutrition labels” and “app tracking transparency,” many (if not most) of Apple’s iPhone users are likely to reject other companies’ data collection and sharing practices once they understand the magnitude of what’s being taken from them. Moreover, these votes for greater data privacy could be a major financial blow to the companies extracting our data because Apple sold more smartphones globally than any other vendor in the last quarter of 2020, almost half of Americans use iPhones (45.3% of the market according to one analyst), more people access social media and messaging platforms from their phones than from other devices, and the personal data pipelines these data extracting companies rely upon could start constricting immediately.   
 
In this tug-of-war between competing business models, the outcry this week was particularly fierce from Facebook, which one analyst predicts could start to take “a 7% revenue hit” (that’s real cash at $6 billion) as early as the second quarter of this year. (Facebook’s revenue take in 2020 was $86 billion, much of it from ad sales fueled by user data.) Mark Zuckerberg charged that Apple’s move tracks its competitive interests, saying its rival “has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work,” among other things, a dig at on-going antitrust investigations involving Apple’s App Store. In a rare expression of solidarity with the little guy, Zuckerberg also argued that small businesses which access customers through Facebook would suffer disproportionately from Apple’s move because of their reliance on targeted advertising. 
 
There’s no question that Apple was flaunting its righteousness on data privacy this week and that Facebook’s “ouches” were the most audible reactions. But there is also no question that a business model fueled by the extraction of personal data has finally been challenged by another dominant market player. In coming weeks and months we’ll find out how interested Apple users are about protecting their privacy on their iPhones and whether their eagerness prompts other tech companies to offer similar safeguards. We’ll get signals from how advertising dollars are being spent as the “underlying profile data” becomes more limited and less reliable. We may also begin to see the gradual evolution of an on-line public space that’s somewhat more respectful of our personal privacy and autonomy.
 
What’s clearer today is that tech users concerned about the privacy of their data and freedom from data-driven manipulation on-line can now limit at least some of the flow of that information to unwelcome strangers in ways that they never had at their disposal before.

All of us should be worried about censorship of our views by content moderators at private companies (whether in journalism or social media) and by governmental authorities that wish to stifle dissenting opinions.  But many of the strongest voices behind regulating the tech giants’ penchant “to moderate content” today come from those who are convinced that press, media and social networking channels both limit access to and censor content from those who differ with “their liberal or progressive points of view.” Their opposition speaks not only to the extraordinary dominance of these tech giants in the public square today but also to the air of grievance that colors the political debates that we’ve been having there.
 
Particularly after President Trump’s removal from Facebook and Twitter earlier this month and the temporary shutdown of social media upstart Parler after Amazon cut off its cloud computing services, there has been a concerted drive to find new ways for individuals and groups to communicate with one another on-line in ways that cannot be censored or “de-platformed” altogether. Like the tug-of-war over personal data privacy, a new polarity over on-line censorship and the ways to get around it could fundamentally alter the character of our on-line public squares.
 
Instead of birthing a gaggle of new “Right-leaning” social media companies with managers who might still be tempted to interfere with irritating content, blockchain software technology is now being utilized to create what amount to “moderation-proof” communication networks.
 
To help with basic blockchain mechanics, this is how I described it here in 2018.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most often with no central monitor, regulator or editor. Its software applications enable every node in its web of connections to record data which can then be seen and reviewed by every other connection. It maintains its accuracy through this transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in what amounts to a digital ledger…

Blockchain-based software can be launched by individuals, organizations or even governments. Software access can be limited to a closed network of participants or open to everyone. A blockchain is usually established to overcome the need for and cost of a “middleman” (like a bank) or some other impediment (like currency regulations, tariffs or burdensome bureaucracy). It promotes “the freer flow” of legal as well as illegal goods, services and information. Blockchain is already driving both modernization and globalization. Over the next several years, it will also have profound impacts on us as individuals. 

If you’d gain from a visual description, this short video from The MIT Technology Review will also show you the basics about this software innovation.  
 
I’ve written several times before about the promise of blockchain-driven systems. For example, Your Work is About to Change Forever (about a bit-coin-type financial future without banks or traditional currencies); Innovation Driving Values (how secure and transparent recording of property rights like land deeds can drive economic progress in the developing world); Blockchain Goes to Work (how this software can enable gig economy workers to monetize their work time in a global marketplace); Data Privacy & Accuracy During the Coronavirus (how a widely accessible global ledger that records accurate virus-related information can reduce misinformation); and, with some interesting echoes today, a 2017 post called Wish Fulfillment (about why a small social media platform called Steem-It was built on blockchain software).    
 
Last Tuesday, the New York Times ran an article titled: They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin. That “Design” in the title was blockchain software. The piece highlighted:

a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internet’s basic building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook or Google [or, indeed, anyone outside of these self-contained platforms] to control.

Among other things, the article described how those “old” internet building blocks would be replaced by blockchain-driven software, enabling social media platforms that would be the successors to the one that Steem-It built several years ago. However, while Steem-It wanted to provide a safe and reliable way to pay contributors for their social media content, in this instance the over-riding drive is “to make it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content.” 

It’s both an intoxicating and a chilling possibility.

While the Times reporter hinted about the risks with ominous quotes and references to the creation of “a decentratlized web of hate,” it’s worth noting that nothing like it has materialized, yet. Also implied but never discussed was the urgency that many feel to avoid censorship of their minority viewpoints by people like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey or even the New York Times editors who effectively decide what to report on and what to ignore. So what’s the bottom line in this tech-enabled tug-of-war between political forces?

The public square that we occupy daily—for communication and commerce, family connection and dissent—a public square that the dominant social media platforms largely provide, cannot (and must not) be governed by @Jack, the sensibilities of mainstream media, or any group of esteemed private citizens like Facebook’s recently appointed Oversight Board. One of the most essential roles of government is to maintain safety and order in, and to set forth the rules of the road for, our public square. Because blockchain-enabled social networks will likely be claiming more of that public space in the near future—even as they strive to evade its common obligations through encryption and otherwise—government can and should enforce the rules for this brave new world.

Until now, our government has failed to confront either on-line censorship or its foreseeable consequences. Because our on-line public square has become (in a few short years) as essential to our way of life as our electricity or water, its social media and similar platforms should be licensed and regulated like those basic services, that is, like utilities—not only for our physical safety but also for the sake of our democratic institutions, which survived their most recent tests but may not survive their next ones if we fail to govern ourselves and our awesome technologies more responsibly.

In this second tug-of-war, we don’t have a moment to lose.

This post was adapted from my January 31, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can sign up by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself Tagged With: app tracking transparency, Apple, autonomy, blockchain, censorship, commons, content monitoring, facebook, freedom of on-line assembly, human tech, privacy, privacy controls, privacy nutrition label, public square, social media platforms

Private Gain, Public Gain

May 11, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Every day I’m surprised at how much the daily shock wave that used be “the news” sucks the air out of whatever room I’m in. It takes an effort to listen for what’s truly interesting and get to the bottom of it before the latest scandal or outrage gets in the way.

Somehow, I’ve managed to follow some of those threads this week.

Paying taxes last month and being involved in a neighborhood controversy has gotten me thinking about what we “hold in common” as neighbors, as citizens and even as human beings. But finding that commonality (in spite of my value judgments, obliviousness and indifference) depends on understanding who’s coming together and what’s important, both to me and to them.

Whatever the community—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, America—understanding means getting below the surface clutter to the problems that really matter. A couple of these reality checks got through this week. The commons that we share is in very bad shape.

Mending these tears in the fabric of my communities requires a new frame of reference. Seeing myself and my work as being only about the pursuit of my private profit and personal gain fails to accommodate other ways that I need to flourish in terms of my personal development and the kinds of communities where I want to live and work. It’s locating capitalism within a broader range of human concerns.

There are some practical ways to think about expanding what we value individually and collectively. While selling our time and skills seems to be “the American way,” increasingly so is the value of “commons-based production” where the primary motivation isn’t getting paid but solving a problem that is important to you and to others. Unpaid, skill-based contributions provide alternate ways of encouraging and valuing problem-solving efforts that are undertaken in common.

Some Reality Checks

I work with kids who have lost parents or caregivers to violence, suicide and illness. It hard for them to deal with the anger of being “abandoned” and the grief they feel around the person that they’ve lost. We try to provide a space for both.

My kids are between 8 and 10 years old. Some are adopted. They come from large, often scattered families. Some have trouble coping in school. All seem grateful to be with other kids facing similar challenges. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine their lives or their futures and feel good about them.

In the week between seeing them again, the controversy around two black men being arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks was all that anyone could talk about. There are problems in this city when it comes to bias and policing, but to me anyway, they seem less important than the day-to-day challenges facing my grieving kids. They also seem far less important than the challenges facing vulnerable black communities in neighborhoods near this Starbucks store. In terms of problems that need solving, it’s a question of priorities.

In an opinion piece this week, Robert Woodson, who is a community development leader, writes as follows:

Although many of the young protesters may authentically believe they are rallying for racial justice, they are in fact playing the role of the decoy. They are a useful diversion for those who reap the profits of the race-grievance industry. Similarly, the continuing mantra of racism serves as a shield for black officials in cities where black neighborhoods have declined and decayed.

While the media focuses on exaggerated instances of presumed racist discrimination, such as the plight of the two nonpurchasing “customers” at the coffee shop, far more grievous problems are ignored. I was born in Philadelphia, not far from where that Starbucks now stands. Back then it was a community that hundreds of low-income black families called home. My father died when I was 9, and I saw how the neighbors and the local fraternal organizations provided buffering support for my mother, who was striving to take care of her five children.

Gentrification in recent decades has brought not only Starbucks but an influx of upscale residents. As in most areas of Central South Philadelphia, low-income families have had to move out of their former neighborhoods. No voice has been raised in their defense, given that this shift was a result of housing policies in a city controlled for decades by black elected officials. But these developments have had serious consequences for low-income blacks: Most have had to move to areas without the supportive community institutions that once provided them stability and resilience. The few families left behind live among the signals of their coming displacement—like the opening of another Starbucks.

Distracted by the surface commotion, I was missing the more serious issue and I suspect that almost everyone else was too.

Another wake-up call was about Pennsylvania. After the 2016 election, many commentators talked about the forgotten voters here who voted for Trump, but this week, those same forgotten communities received a different kind of attention. Pennsylvania has more “deaths of despair” (from suicide, alcohol and drug abuse) than any other state in the U.S.

No one who lives in “a commons” is forgotten and allowed to die like this. At least some of the despair that has caused this death spiral comes from their falling outside of and not belonging to any real community.

We are as divided by indifference as we are by our politics.

A Different Frame of Reference

Because “the business of America is business,” we have come to see what we need most in America as material plenty: at least enough for ourselves and our families, and hopefully a lot more than that. It’s resulted in what many would argue is one of our central problems today: the unequal distribution of America’s material plenty. It’s the 1% against everyone else.

But as Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher reminds us, the need for material plenty is not the only need that we have and redistributing it may not be the best way to solve our problems. Our material needs co-exist in a system of moral exchange with our “spiritual” needs, such as having the freedom to flourish as individuals. For Sen, our material needs are never favored over the non-material ones. But in determining what we should do when confronting a problem or opportunity, he simply provides a broader array of questions to ask and answer about both of these needs in the struggle to reach a “durable” solution.

For example, in his groundbreaking Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen recasts the usual (material) critique of the problem, namely that famine is caused solely by what people lack (namely food and how to pay for and deliver it) by proposing the removal of impediments to the victims’ freedom to provide for themselves (by, or example, changing the ways that society distributes food producing resources in the first place). Almost alone among modern economists, Sen’s system makes difficult economic choices by considering both material and non-material human needs.

In a world of scarce resources, Sen’s approach allows for moral choices that are more nuanced and realistic than merely redistributing material wealth from those who have it to those who don’t.  People whose lives are broken by either gentrification or despair might also solve their own problems if society made fundamental economic choices (about matters like taxes, zoning, or the availability of medical care and job training) by acknowledging the role that these victim’s need to flourish could play in the allocation of limited resources.

An essay published this week describes Sen’s singular accomplishment by returning to his consideration of famine.

Every major work on material inequality in the 21st century owes a debt to Sen. But his own writings treat material inequality as though the moral frameworks and social relationships that mediate economic exchanges matter. Famine is the nadir of material deprivation. But it seldom occurs – Sen argues – for lack of food. To understand why a people goes hungry, look not for catastrophic crop failure; look rather for malfunctions of the moral economy that moderates competing demands upon a scarce commodity. Material inequality of the most egregious kind is the problem here. But piecemeal modifications to the machinery of production and distribution will not solve it. The relationships between different members of the economy must be put right. Only then will there be enough to go around. (the italics are mine)

If you’re interested in reading more about Sen, this article in The Guardian a few years back offers an overview of his ideas and how they contribute to the uniqueness of his approach to the future today.

The Joy of Contributing to a Common Effort

Adam Smith was not merely the poster-boy for capitalism as we know it. In addition to The Wealth of Nations (the first modern book about economics), he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (which argued that our self-interests should always be balanced by our sympathies for others).

Amartya Sen isn’t opposed to capitalism. He simply attempts to overcome some of its limitations by defining human needs more broadly where resources are limited.

Similarly, an essay this week about “commons-based production” from two scholars visiting Harvard from Estonia is not, in their words, merely “small-scale, bucolic, catering to an Arcadia, a dream-world for Leftie intellectuals.” What their argument does is provide one, already-operational template to harness Smith’s and Sen’s desire to solve economic problems in more human-centered (and less self-interested) ways.

The essay’s authors begin by noting the revolution in information and communications technology that has given rise to cooperative endeavors like freely contributing to the base of general knowledge in Wikipedia and to the open-source programming of software like Linux.  These web-based possibilities have not changed who we are as human beings, but they do allow us “to develop in ways that had previously been blocked, whether by chance or design,” according to the authors. Sen would say that they provide new avenues for human flourishing in the economic sphere because there are considerations beyond buying, selling and material gain.

The author’s write:

There are many reasons to contribute beyond or beside that of receiving monetary payment. CBPP [or Commons-based Peer Production] allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations such as the need to learn or to communicate. However, most importantly, a key incentive is the desire to create something mutually useful to those contributing. This also generally means that people contribute because they find it meaningful and useful, and they believe the resulting product worthwhile. Wikipedians and hackers primarily want to create something useful for themselves, and for other people, not for the market or for short-term profit.” (again, the italics are mine)

Rising technologies like block-chain, which can remove banks or governments as intermediaries to economic transactions will make possible additional kinds of collaboration and unlock new kinds of empowerment and wealth creation. In a February newsletter (“Innovation Driving Values”), I wrote about a platform that gives poor people the ability to publish clear title to their land via blockchain. In a newsletter last October, I talked about a social media hybrid called Steemit, where contributors are paid for their “involvement” on the site as writers, commenters, and likers instead of giving away “their involvement” in exchange for “free” use of, say, Facebook’s platform and Facebook’s sale of their information to advertisers. In other words, these technologies make it possible to consider not only new ways of cooperating but also of new ways of profiting from cooperative exchanges.

Not changing the whole world, just the parts of it that touch us.

We are all motivated by more than how much money we make, how much it can buy, and how well it insulates us from everyone else.

Our “spiritual,” non-material, cooperative and collaborative motivations provide ways to bridge some of what divides us in each commons of our public lives, from our neighborhoods, to the states where we live, and finally within America itself.

We can elevate our problem solving by acknowledging that everyone who shares a public commons with us wants the freedom to flourish. The economic choices we make as stakeholders will be more durable and satisfying when we learn how to do so.

Without the need to make money, we can leverage the technological innovation that is making it possible to collaborate with one another to create products that are useful and worthwhile because of the joy in doing so. Moreover, it’s a cooperative approach to problem solving that can be utilized in the public commons that we also share.

I still have a long way to go in thinking through these ideas. I know that they don’t come together in a perfect argument, or even a very good one. On the other hand, I fear that what divides us from one another over what is necessary and important poses the single greatest risk that we face today in each of our communities.

Deaths of despair, a persistent preoccupation with lesser problems as a way to avoid the more serious ones that are staring us and our leaders in the face: these are canaries in the coalmine where we find ourselves, and more of them keep dropping.

Thinking more broadly about what we value and bringing that perspective into new kinds of problem-solving in the commons seems the most fruitful way forward—however cobbled together my current game plan. If you’ve been thinking about what divides us today and what can be done to bring us together, I’d love to hear from you.

For our own sake, we urgently need to find more common places where what’s important to us overlaps.

Note to readers: in a different form, this content was included in my May 6, 2018 Newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself Tagged With: Amartya Sen, common ground, commons, commons based production, community, cooperation, economic values, material needs, non-material needs, social division, values

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