This piece won the grand prize for Technology and Innovation at the prestigious Web Report 2022 awards. More on that here.
Every person is priceless. Yes, in the philosophical sense too, but even more so in the brutal sense, from the point of view of today’s online world. Once we found ourselves in the information age, somehow, surprisingly, what turned out to matter most was not the information that reaches us, but the information we leave behind. Though we rarely realize it.
“If something is free, you are the product.” You have probably seen this line online, and it is uncompromisingly accurate.
“You are not the internet giants’ customer, you are their product,” says Jaron Lanier, the digital prophet who brought virtual reality into the world of technology and who is now a fierce opponent of what is happening with our data.
How did we get here? Why does none of us today care about the information trail we leave behind? What is its price?
Give Us Data
Who could possibly care about me enough for it to be worth hiding when I go to the store, whether I liked a colleague’s status, what my last search online was?
Honestly, I keep following the same herd logic myself. Seen from the perspective of the future, though, this may be one of the biggest mistakes we are all making. Drawn into arguments for and against vaccines / the measures / our favorite politician / team / brand of underwear… all of us together are creating a product that can change us and, even worse, crudely manipulate us.
One way or another, every step we take on the internet shapes our future.
Today, the moment you land on even the moldiest, most forgotten website in the world, you get that annoying little window, which you close before you have even read that it is about the notorious GDPR and the protection of personal data. The system introduced by the European Union has turned out to be a hypocritical and ineffective answer to the issue, one that has even deepened the problem. It has turned it into a formality, because hardly more than 1 in 10 users would tell you they know what the regulation actually says. Barely even 1 in 100 would have the time to read the long list of information a given site may store.
Just as it used to be back when programs were installed rather than used online by everyone. You scroll, you agree, and that’s it.
The Data Tax
And do you know why GDPR is just dust in our eyes? Here, you can easily see for yourself.
Have you ever wondered what the biggest players, say Facebook and Google, know about you?
In fact, it is easy to check, even though almost nobody does. The right links, which still work flawlessly today, were collected by The Guardian in 2018. To tell you the truth, they never stop amazing me.
Where were you at 9 a.m. on May 2, 2015? That day must have been very special for you to remember… but Google remembers. Right here you can find the complete history of your location for every minute you had location access turned on on your phone. You get ultra-precise statistics too.
Convenient, isn’t it?
You Are Your Data
There is much more. Google keeps the history of absolutely every search you have made, every contact with the web from the very first moment you logged into your account.
You agreed to it; it is all perfectly voluntary. It is spelled out in the terms each of us accepted when we first opened the search engine. Then you get emails about every update to the rules; legally, everything is just fine. You even have access to all the stored data.
To get it, go right here. You are perfectly free to download all the files Google keeps for your account. I, for example, select all services except, of course, file storage, photos and mail, which are “heavier” and which I deliberately keep there. Search histories, movements, comments… and who knows what else. It turns out I have data in a total of 47 of the company’s products; I download 44 of them and… I get an archive of 8.89 gigabytes.
Everything is detailed and clear. The search archive precisely remembers everything from the past decade, every single combination of keywords with all its details. And for each one it clearly shows me that I myself agreed to have it stored—no argument there.
The Tax on Data
Almost 9 gigabytes just for me?
Do you know what resources it takes to keep that much data on more than two billion accounts on the platform? On top of Google’s usual services, which take up even more. And they give you a service that is free.
Here is one more touch. Here you will find your ad settings on Google. Yes, you most certainly never chose them yourself. The truth is that this page holds the profile the global search engine has built of you, based on all the gigabytes you have left it.
It decides on its own what your interests are and what ads to show you accordingly. What excites you and what doesn’t. Personally, skimming through them, I can easily spot a few things it got wrong, but the rest it knows with uncanny precision.
Data and Dante
On to the other “good” old giant. The other social networks are hardly much different, but here we are talking about a decade and a half of history for a great many users.
“The age of privacy is over, and it will no longer be a social norm,” Zuckerberg said in an interview back in 2010. And yet we have seen how even he puts a sticker over his camera.
Do you know what Facebook knows about you? Well, you can easily guess, even just by following the memories it reminds you of. Or by the way, until recently, it recognized who was in a photo.
Yes, things are not as neatly arranged here, but you can download all the information officially kept about you too. The place to start, a kind of launching point, is this one.
What I find here about myself is a vast sea, which, however, freezes while I am downloading it. Other people say their data does download, and again it runs into gigabytes. Every tiny movement on the network, every like, every friend.
The Friendly Big Brother
So what? Really, what do we have to lose? We only gain conveniences from all these huge volumes of information. How else would we be served the latest news, how else would our history of conversations with friends be kept for us to revisit? Websites generate personalized content when you come back; they know what interests us and prepare it for our convenience. Clearly we don’t have time to go in and read all the news—we can’t even skim it all—so it is better to get what matters to us ready-made, selected according to our interests.
What’s the problem? First of all: it is absurd that issues like data storage become a headache for tiny websites worrying about GDPR rules, while the mastodons offer them in the fine print, you accept, and that’s that. What’s more, you are convinced that if you refuse, you will get a worse, incomplete service.
And then comes the huge question of how all this can be used and who controls it.
Nobody. Nobody controls it, and that is where the problems begin. The first and most obvious is that, thanks to all this stored data, we enter the filter bubble. We surround ourselves with news we like, with people who are supposedly like-minded. To keep us interested, what used to be social networks, now turned into machines for holding attention, put us in front of “allies” and “enemies.” They provoke our interest and activity, drag us into endless, pointless arguments… turning us into fanatical ultras.
Then, though, comes something even worse.
Hunting for Data
Artificial intelligence. Yes, it is high time this phrase was replaced by something that more accurately describes the field at this stage of its development—it is often quite misleading. Either way, behind it lies the technological field of machine learning and its specialty of recent years: deep neural networks.
These are algorithms that it is not quite accurate to call “intelligence,” but they are definitely getting better and better at the tasks set for them. Deep neural networks keep improving at helping us with all kinds of tasks. The much-hyped GPT-3, for example, showed that algorithms are getting ever better at producing text in natural languages, at translating between them, even at… writing computer code.
So what do the giants knowing everything, absolutely everything, about our online behavior and sparing no resources to store it have in common with the progress of algorithms?
If you follow the news, you may remember, at least by name, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It involved a supposedly psychological study that turned out to have gained access to a huge volume of Facebook users’ personal data—access to 87 million accounts was proven—in order to plan the advertising and the marketing targeting of a number of ad campaigns.
The case became a scandal because it was linked to the way Donald Trump’s campaign was advertised in the previous US presidential election. Gradually the scandal grew, Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt, and Mark Zuckerberg had to fry through a fair number of hearings in the US Senate, complete with moralizing messages and all the hallmarks of a ninth-grade chemistry oral exam.
Big Data
After that, people stopped talking about these things, because the Senate and GDPR had “saved” us from them.
Well, a few months ago they were back in focus after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, revealed details about how the company’s algorithm works. That it does not care in the least about the messages or the credibility of the information; commercial logic stays at the top—holding attention at any cost.
That comes as no surprise. And yet the subject is much bigger. Deep learning technologies are advancing dramatically, and that is wonderful. They promise us, and will certainly deliver, very soon at that, breakthroughs in many more areas of human life.
But how do they work? They simply learn to make good use of algorithms known since the dawn of mathematics in order to find patterns, aided by the power of neural networks. And the larger and more detailed the volumes of data at their disposal, the more precise their predictions. Solutions of this kind have proven capable of results that until recently looked like miracles in countless fields.
Machine learning finds the patterns in data. And today the data from our every step is enormous, and so is the power of computers. So, if we turn back to the realm of information, the perfect manipulator is born. One that could make systems like the infamous Chinese social credit system look like child’s play.
Gift-Wrapped
Less and less of the algorithms’ good work depends on the programmers and on the investment in a particular project. And more and more of it depends on the sheer volume of data. In medicine, for example, this remains a huge problem: artificial intelligence still fails to show its full potential because of the lack of sufficiently solid data to process. That data is protected by rules, non-standardized, incomplete…
But that is not how things stand in digital marketing. Yes, at the risk of being biased toward this field, the fact is that it helps meaningful causes shine.
But it is also a powerful weapon that knows how to wield algorithms with access to huge databases. With our gigabytes of decisions and choices in one direction or another, we help programs become frighteningly good at their job. The GDPR window on yet another website will not tell us that how manipulable we are today really does depend on our personal data.
Programmatic
So is it a coincidence that Facebook even went as far as threatening to leave Europe over restrictions on storing its European customers’ data on American servers?
Do you still think your data is not the most valuable commodity of one of the most expensive companies on the planet?
The era of ever more personalized marketing is coming. It will read our behavior with ever greater precision, using algorithms and the enormous data at their disposal.
The first such field is programmatic marketing. It uses huge data sets to achieve optimal reach for ads and other marketing messages. You can target them with the help of artificial intelligence, or simply through ultra-precise personalization—down to the level where only the people living in a particular apartment block receive them. Or have them shown only when it rains, or only when a given user’s favorite team scores a goal.
In fact, the ideal example here is that same Facebook’s programmatic advertising algorithm, which marketers consider one of their most successful weapons in recent years. It is getting ever easier to give it general instructions and let it “tailor” the ad on its own to be as effective as possible, using users’ data. Artificial intelligence, an algorithm that only shows what the beginning looks like.
Information Wars
Of course, all this is presented as a service both to advertisers and to the customers who receive the ads. Whether that is true… I am sure you can judge for yourself based on everything said so far.
What’s more, Facebook keeps announcing that users suffer because in recent years access to the full data of users on Apple devices has been restricted. Whether this is about corporate wars or about caring for users on one side or the other… I also think there is no need to speculate.
Because what is more important and interesting is something else. What comes next? Yes, this Digital Story, like every other, could never have reached you without the help of Facebook and Google. And yet the data we gift them in our search for convenience can turn against us. It is not even clear how, but quietly, on a massive scale and ever more skillfully. We must not underestimate it.
It is worth recalling Jaron Lanier’s words more often: “You are not the internet giants’ customer, you are their product.”
