'We Didn't Lose Control Of Our Personal Data -- It Was Stolen From Us By People Farmers' (ar.al)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, wrote an open-letter over the weekend to mark the 28th anniversary of his invention. In his letter, he shared three worrisome things that happened over the last twelve months. In his letter, Berners-Lee pointed out three things that occurred over the past 12 months that has him worried: we do not assume control of our personal data anymore; how easy it is for misinformation to spread on the web; and lack of transparency on political advertising on the web. Cyborg rights activist Aral Balkan wrote a piece yesterday arguing that perhaps Berners-Lee is being modest about the things that concern him. From the article: It's important to note that these (those three worrisome things) are not trends and that they've been in the making for far longer than twelve months. They are symptoms that are inextricably linked to the core nature of the Web as it exists within the greater socio-technological system we live under today that we call Surveillance Capitalism. Tim says we've "lost control of our personal data." This is not entirely accurate. We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us by Silicon Valley. It is stolen from you every day by people farmers; the Googles and the Facebooks of the world. It is stolen from you by an industry of data brokers, the publishing behavioural advertising industry ("adtech"), and a long tail of Silicon Valley startups hungry for an exit to one of the more established players or looking to compete with them to own a share of you. The elephants in the room -- Google and Facebook -- stand silently in the wings, unmentioned except as allies later on in the letter where they're portrayed trying to "combat the problem" of misinformation. Is it perhaps foolish to expect anything more when Google is one of the biggest contributors to recent web standards at the W3C and when Google and Facebook both help fund the Web Foundation? Let me state it plainly: Google and Facebook are not allies in our fight for an equitable future -- they are the enemy. These platform monopolies are factory farms for human beings; farming us for every gram of insight they can extract. If, as Tim states, the core challenge for the Web today is combating people farming, and if we know who the people farmers are, shouldn't we be strongly regulating them to curb their abuses?

Comments

It isn't stolen at all

[gatkinso]

WE give it away freely.

This should be obvious,

Same thing with manhatten island.

[fish_in_the_c]

It was 'bought' from the native American for a pile of beads. The fact that the actual value was of the exchange was inequitable and one of the parties in the contract didn't even understand what property ownership meant, is of course irrelevant? Isn't it?
The fact the native Americans believed you could no more own the land then the sky really has no bearing on weather or not they contractually obligated themselves or the other party was being honest about the value of the exchange?

A very similar situation here, the customer basically doesn't understand what they are giving away or what it's value is, so to them they are seemingly 'getting something for free'.

Re:Same thing with manhatten island.

[Solandri]

Oh, people understand exactly what's happening. For over a decade I ran my own private mail and web server, on server space I paid for. I explained the privacy issues to friends and offered to give them a free email account and web space. They still signed up for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail; Geocities, MySpace, and Facebook instead.

Here's how the average person values things:

1. Easy to use
2. Free
...
187. Protects your privacy

That's the problem with what the privacy advocates are preaching. People tend to assume others think and behave as they themselves do. So the privacy advocates all make the incorrect assumption that if The People just knew what was happening with their private data, they would be horrified and rebel against the data farmers like Google and Facebook. That they don't know the true value of their privacy.

News flash: The People don't care. They value their private data so little that they think that trading it for free email and web services is a great bargain for them. If you want to attack this, it's going to have to be via another angle that people actually do care about. Maybe the financial impact of identity theft.

Never had control

[tomhath]

We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us

The WWW never provided a way to control our personal data. Its goal was to make all information available everywhere.

IMO, it's even worse than they say

[Rick Schumann]

I think it's even worse than just plain old garden-variety theft of our personal information. There has also been for some time now a systematic indoctrination of the general public, the younger generation in particular, that the desire for 'privacy' is either a symptom of some sort of mental illness, or evidence of criminal intent, and that 'sharing' of everything with everyone (even if you've never met them in person, only ever online) via so-called 'social media' is what's normal and natural. Then there's the fact that ubiquitos mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) lack what I'd consider even a basic level of data security, as well as 'apps' intentionally harvesting data (GPS coordinates, browsing habits, etc) without the knowledge of the end-user. Add to all this the harvesting of all Internet traffic of individual users by ISPs and wireless companies, plus actual criminals and criminal organizations actively exploiting security holes and weaknesses to outright steal people's identity and banking data, both over the Internet, and in real life via hardware devices like card skimmers (both activities are, relatively speaking, rampant). No one is particularly interested in fixing any of these situations, either, because actually giving people the means by which to secure their digital devices and their personal data to a reasonable degree would mean the end of the monetization of end-user data by so-called 'people farmers'. Of course none of this even begins to touch on what 'law enforcement' agencies and 'government intelligence' agencies are getting out of this Wild West of Internet data rustling; they all have every reason, in their natural mode of over-reaching and obsessive need to control everything and everyone, to allow it all to continue, because it makes it that much easier for them to grab any and all data on any and all persons they care to. Meanwhile it's only the ever-thinner patina of actual rule of law and basic human and civil rights that keep all of this in check to any extent -- and those aspects of our society are weakening, especially in the most recent major change in our socio-political landscape here in the United States. At this point in time, the only way to protect yourself at all from further intrusions is to leave the Internet behind entirely and go back to the old ways of doing things: write paper checks for your bills, pay cash for everything, use a landline phone, stay off the Internet entirely, or just stop having Internet access altogether. Of course the situation has degenerated to the point already where if you 'go off the grid' like that, you raise all sorts of red flags, sparking even more intrusions of your privacy, as our so-called 'law enforcement' investigates you for suspected terrorism. All in all it's a dark time we're currently living in, and I'm afraid it's going to get darker before it gets better. The only advice I can give anyone is to hold on; these things tend to go in cycles. Eventually, there will be a revolution of sorts, and reforms to roll back all the intrusions into people's lives. The younger generation may, for the moment, believe that 'privacy' is some sort of sickness, but as they get older, they'll understand what it is they gave away -- and they might well fight to get it back, if not for themselves, then for the next generation.

Re:Not Stolen

[Anonymous Coward]

Providing the data is anonymised...

How can you possibly think that the data is ever anonymized?? Any company asserting that is flat out lying. For years and years, it's been stated that the holy grail of advertising is personalized advertising, i.e., ads aimed at you and no one else. Ads based on anonymous data can't be any more effective than ads on TV.