Regulators from all corners of the globe consistently fail to force tech firms like Google, Meta and Baidu to respect their users' privacy. Why is that? And how can we fix it?
I’m currently reading Shoshana Zuboff’s ’The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ and it has made me think about how one would go about making the internet less of a privacy nightmare. Reading the book it becomes clear that the Google’s and Amazon’s of the world are not just moving fast and breaking things, but rather they are consistently and deliberately infringing their users’ privacy, and most crucially that their business models are fundamentally reliant on doing so. By collecting user data on an industrial scale tech firms are able to sell that data to advertisers on both a micro and a macro scale. Advertisers are both interested in the individual’s habits and tastes to sell that individual a specific product or service, the micro scale, and in how people in the hundreds of thousands act and spend, the macro scale. The core of many software tech giants’ business models is to offer a useful service for free, see how people use it to gather data on those users, and sell that data to advertisers or otherwise use that data to make more targeted advertising. The solution to stop Meta from spying on their users then requires not just tackling specific intrusive behaviours like using intrusive cookies but to force such companies to change their business models. The question is: how? and why haven't governments done so already?
One solution is the incrementalist approach the EU uses: to identify bad behaviours and make laws forcing the tech giants to be more transparent and giving the users more options like to opt out of cookies. The problem is that surveillance capitalist firms often try to circumvent the rules, for example by not allowing users from the EU on their sites to nor have to offer cookie settings or by claiming that the use of cookies falls under ”legitimate interest”, i.e. that the cookies are absolutely necessary even when they are used to track users. Another solution would be to tackle the advertising industry, after all Facebook famously makes its money by running ads, if there were no advertisers to sell user data to there would be no need to collect it. Banning advertising is obviously not the solution, but I do think that coming at the problem of internet privacy not being respected by focusing on the demand side of user data, i.e. going after the buyers rather than extractors of said data could give regulators the edge against surveillance capitalists.
One of the hardest problems of regulating the internet has been the expertise imbalance between firms and governments. Since tech giants are wildly profitable they can afford to pay technology experts far more than most governments would, which gives the tech firms greater subject matter expertise than the regulators. In the infamous Congress hearing where Facebook’s (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned it became clear that many of America’s legislators lack basic knowledge of how computers work. If legislators can’t print a document without help from their grandchildren there is simply no way that they are qualified to legislate on complex and highly technical issues like content algorithms and cookies. That’s not really an indictment of legislators though, just a result of the expertise imbalance. Making rules about buying and selling data is closer to topics more familiar to most legislators; and by using broader economic rules to go after privacy abusers those rules run a lesser risk of being full of loopholes or becoming obsolete than more narrow technical rules would. This sort of approach obviously wouldn't be a panacea, but given how the tech firms are always several steps ahead of the regulators I think it'd be worth giving a new strategy a go.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Sources:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff
Cover photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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