Rebel Tech AllianceWhy should I care?
Why should you care? After all, you’ve got nice gadgets, which work really well. You can communicate with people all over the world for free. Most of the services are free! You see ads that are personalised to you, and these can be really interesting, sparking new ideas for things to buy.
Have you heard (or said yourself) these common statements when considering that Big Tech might be unhealthy?
- “But I like personalised ads”
- “They’ve already got all my data”
- “I have nothing to hide”
It’s easy to feel resigned like this, to feel it is ‘inevitable’. But we’re here to tell you that once you fully understand the game you can play it differently, and doing so will change the game.
The dark side of Big Tech
There is a sinister side to big tech, a side they desperately don’t want you to see. And we wish it stopped at the addictive nature of our devices and creepy feeling that you’re being watched. That would be bad enough, but it’s much worse than that.
The surveillance part - the secret extraction of massive amounts of metadata from every phone, website and app, 24/7 – that’s just stage one: extraction. There are two further stages: prediction and manipulation. It’s this last one that is most sinister because it involves behaviour change. We are being subtly herded. Our behaviour subtly moulded.
In the commercial realm this is most easily seen in the design changes of Amazon over the last 20 years. We used to choose what we wanted, now we do what we’re told and take Amazon’s choice.
This quote from The Digital Republic, by Jamie Susskind, sums it up:
"The problem with data processing is not that consumers get a bad commercial deal. On the contrary, exchanging personal data for free stuff is often a good bargain. Tech firms take our data, which is of little financial value to us, and turn it into something profitable. There’s nothing commercially objectionable about that. The real problem is that data can be used to monitor, exploit or manipulate people. For the republican, the data dividend cannot compensate for that loss of liberty."
Data gets political
But it’s in the political realm that the manipulation is most dangerous. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed us how elections can be heavily influenced by the micro-targeting of ads and news to people on social media. In 2016 the Trump 1.0 and Brexit votes were both swung by the manipulation afforded by surveillance capitalism. And it wasn’t just one side manipulating the other (the Trump and Brexit campaigns ruthlessly stirred up outrage in moderates by targeting them with extreme material), there was also a Russian military-sponsored information warfare (trolling) operation going on in the background. This has been proven in the US via the Mueller Report, and outlined in The Russia Report in the UK.
How did the Russian government gain the ability to interfere in US and British politics? It turns out that all that data that is being harvested about you, and processed into profiles, is not just available to advertisers. Anyone can pose as an advertiser and purchase the information they need to target very narrow groups of people. And how is that possible? Your personal metadata is traded, hundreds of times per second, in a giant online automated data market called the RTB system: The Real Time Bidding System. It gets to the RTB either directly or via Data Brokers.
So a company trying to sell you shoes can access the targeted data to reach you, but so can a foreign government or a political party in your country. Have you ever heard the expression “Data is the new oil”? Well now you know why they say that – that amount of personal data allows that amount of influence over behaviour. And influence over behaviour is power. And power is government. And government is democracy… but for how long?
You were saying?
Go to these pages to find out more about why those three statements don't really hold water:
➡️ “But I like personalised ads”