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How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy

(Via The New York Times)

For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich. Privacy, like wealth, was something that most people had little or none of. Farmers, slaves and serfs resided in simple dwellings, usually with other people, sometimes even sharing space with animals. They had no expectation that a meaningful part of their lives would be unwatchable or otherwise off limits to others. That would have required homes with private rooms. And only rich people had those.

The spread of mass privacy, surely one of modern civilization’s more impressive achievements, thus depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class. Only over the past 300 years or so, as increasingly large numbers of people gained the means to control their physical environment through the acquisition of wealth and private property, did privacy norms and eventually privacy rights come into existence. What is a right to privacy without a room of your own?

The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangement — and therefore a contingent and impermanent state of affairs. And it reminds us, second, that in a capitalist country, our baseline of privacy depends on where the money is. And today that has changed.

The forces of wealth creation no longer favor the expansion of privacy but work to undermine it. We have witnessed the rise of what I call “attention merchants” and what the sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — the commodification of our personal data by tech giants like Facebook and Google and their imitators in telecommunications, electronics and other industries. We face a future in which active surveillance is such a routine part of business that for most people it is nearly inescapable. In this respect, we are on the road back to serfdom.

That future, however, is not preordained, for Americans overwhelmingly want stronger privacy protections. But that will require laws that do not merely tinker with but fundamentally alter the economics of privacy.

To be sure, ours is not the first era in which privacy has come under attack. American moralists at the height of the temperance movement pushed for laws that gave the police broad authority to break into homes and arrest drinkers, adulterers and gay men. Authoritarian and totalitarian states, insecure in their power, have always fought mass privacy with their spies and extensive networks of secret police, as have democratic countries at war or in times of unrest.

But none of these opponents of privacy had capitalism firmly on its side. In the United States, it is safe to say, privacy “won” the 20th century. Its crowning triumph was the Supreme Court’s recognition in 1965 of a constitutional right to privacy, but the legal victory should not obscure the economic forces that were its foundation.

By the 1960s the rise of a propertied middle class had put each man in his “castle,” each drinker in his saloon, each worker in his own office and each child in her own bedroom. Private physical spaces, along with semiprivate spaces like motels, bathhouses and dance clubs, created their own expectations of privacy (as did, later, virtual spaces like personal computers and hard drives). It was on those foundations that legal thinkers and activists began to speak of the masses enjoying a right to privacy, to be unwatched — a right to be “left alone.” Capitalism was on privacy’s side.

In those earlier times, surveillance wasn’t particularly profitable, but over the last two decades, new technologies coupled with new theories of value have transformed the economics of privacy. A drastic decrease in the cost of mass surveillance (thanks to the internet) has increased the value of two types of asset: our data and our attention. The race to maximize those assets by companies big and small has made surveillance a growth industry. It is in this sense that capitalism has begun to change sides.

You can, of course, still make plenty of money in more traditional ways. But the richest companies in the world now generate wealth by putting as many trackers, devices and screens inside our homes and as close to our bodies as possible. Accumulated data creates competitive advantage, and money can be made by consolidating everything that is known about an individual.

This business model was pioneered by Facebook, Google and the online advertising industry, but other sectors of the economy now want in. Amazon is a convert, as are cable and telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon, as well as the electronics industry with its “smart” devices that spy as they serve. Many employers also now constantly watch their employees. There is good reason to believe that, if nothing is done, gratuitous surveillance will be built into nearly every business and business model.

Some have argued that there’s no need to be concerned. After all, even in an age of constant surveillance, we’re talking about being watched not by the secret police but by advertisers and other commercial enterprises. This “spying,” the argument goes, only makes products better and advertisements more “personalized.” The end result is selling people stuff, not sending them to Siberia.

But this argument ignores several hard truths that we have learned in the last decade. One is that data and surveillance networks created for one purpose can and will be used for others. You must assume that any personal data that Facebook or Android keeps are data that governments around the world will try to get or that thieves will try to steal.

A similar lesson can be drawn from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook collected information from millions of users for one set of purposes, but Cambridge Analytica, a political data company working for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, used that information to try to influence American voters.

Perhaps the hardest truth we’ve learned is that once you realize you’re being watched, it is a tough sensation to shake. As our experiences with social media have made all too clear, we act differently when we know we are “on the record.” Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are. At stake, then, is something akin to the soul.

Some 92 percent of Americans say they want stronger privacy protections. This is why there has been a spate of new state privacy laws and new privacy bills in Congress. But too many of these interventions are small bore — more notices and disclaimers to read and click through, more excessively complex options for how to manage your account. Tinkering around the edges will not work.

To be truly effective, privacy laws must seek to change the incentives that foster gratuitous surveillance and the reckless accumulation of personalized data. We need strong bans, including those that prohibit companies from sharing their customers’ personal information. New rights for consumers have to be easy to understand (like the European Union’s “right to be forgottenClose X”) and easy to use (like a national “do not track” list). And companies that repeatedly fail to protect sensitive data need to face dire consequences.

Nor is there any reason not to use our buying power strategically. Those who want privacy should support and reward the companies who respect it. The economics of privacy would change if enough consumers bought from companies that don’t spy on us and whose products actually help people avoid an unwanted gaze.

Privacy is sometimes characterized as the concern of only an overly sensitive elite. But it was once only an overly sensitive elite that cared about public literacy or stopping child labor. The driving ambition of modern civilization has been to pull us out of a feudal existence, to extend what were once thought of as luxuries to everyday people.

Now is no time to drift backward — especially not in the name of progress.

Fonte: The New York Times
Crediti foto: Eric Carter

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