The New York Times published two important stories on surveillance and disinformation this week. The first is Shoshana Zuboff’s essay on surveillance capitalism, its future and how it shapes the dissemination of knowledge online in what she calls an “epistemic coup”.
The second is an exposé of how personal location data, collected and sold by common phone apps, can be used to track people. In this particular case, they are used to identify individuals who participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
In alt-reality circles, it is common knowledge that Bill Gates is a vaccines philanthropist not out of the goodness of his heart but because he plans to inject microchips into the bloodstreams of millions, so some mighty cabal can track them. If nothing else, the NY Times article shows that this narrative is not only crazy science fiction, but also a thoroughly meaningless fixation.
These conspiracy theorists, and the rest of us too, are already carrying around digital tracking devices voluntarily. Why? Most smart phone users have no clue that app owners sell their location data on a thriving surveillance market, to advertising companies, tech companies, hedge funds, US intelligence agencies and all kinds of shadowy entities curious enough to pay up.
This data is ostensibly anonymized. In practice, due to the amount of information gathered and the way it is aggregated, it is all too easy to connect the “advertising ID” to individuals by tracking persons to their homes or by cross-referencing it with data from the web where email addresses, social media accounts and phone numbers give away the game.
New York Times reporters Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson describe their investigation as a story of a “broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation”. Sure, depending on what phone you use, you can refuse to allow apps to access your location data. But that’s cold comfort when most users have no idea their apps are tracking them, many don’t know how to change permissions for apps on their phones, and even if you are aware of these things:
Without checking, do you know exactly which apps have permission to access your location data? Do you know what you have “agreed” that they do with that data?
Location tracking is just the tip of the iceberg. We can combat that particular variant of data harvesting by deleting overreaching apps, revoking location data permissions, turning off our phones, or using a Faraday pouch to block signals to and from the device. But the threat of the surveillance society cuts deeper. As individuals, we have no chance of escaping it. Only as communities, wielding our democratic power, are we equipped to take it on.
Like Shoshana Zuboff, Warzel and Thompson warn that we are sliding into a world of pervasive surveillance without realizing the consequences. They write:
Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. [...] We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.
Shoshana Zuboff is the author and Harvard professor who coined the term “surveillance capitalism”. In her New York Times essay she frames the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories online as “epistemic chaos”, sprung from the nature of the surveillance economy.
She, too, writes of an urgent battle for freedoms we have come to take for granted:
We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is the fight for the soul of our information civilization.
Zuboff urges us to wield our democratic powers to abolish the harvesting and selling of behavioural data, just like in the past we have abolished slavery, trafficking and a market for human organs. We did this even though abolishing slavery, for instance, had profound effects on American and European economies.
This gives some hope that – as powerful as Google and Facebook seem today – another online order is still possible. Indeed, Zuboff ends on a positive note:
We have a democratic information civilization to build, and there is no time to waste.
It is always prudent to be wary of rhetoric that urges “fight” and “battle”, as recent events has emphasized. But the fight for the soul of the internet is one that is not going to fight itself. It is one that will only be won by radical, peaceful, democratic action. It will take users, voters, citizens, raising their voices and asking for a New Deal for the digital.
Depending on where you are in the world, you yourself will have different avenues of taking political action. One step you can always take for the hell of it, however, is to make your own Faraday pouch. Such pouches are available commercially, promising to block signals to and from your phone reliably. But making your own is as easy as taking a sheet of aluminium foil and carefully wrapping your phone in it whenever you want to go off-grid.
Most of us have scant personal reason to shield our data from prying eyes at any given moment, but on a macro-level the reasons are abundant, as evidenced by the two New York Times articles. Besides, in an era of data exploitation, there’s an illicit pleasure in assuming control of your own personal information, if only for a moment.
The Faraday pouch is no panacea for the woes of the surveillance society; it’s a political statement. A supermodern fashion accessory. An ironic wink to the tin foil crowd.
After all, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to track you.