There is a link between the abundance of hate speech, the incivility that abounds on social networks, the practices that weaken the music industry, the lack of discoverability of works from minority cultures and the dismantling of the conditions for the viability of media. These dysfunctions all have to do with the modes of creating value from the data produced in connected spaces. They reflect the pitfalls of the surveillance society where the value of data is expropriated by companies in exchange for derisory conditions.
The virtualization of exchanges has generated an economy characterized by the extraction of value from the innumerable data produced by all those who evolve in the connected world. In his last annual report, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Daniel Therrien, wrote that “the context of privacy protection has changed”. He found that tech giants like Facebook and Google seem to know more about us than we know ourselves. The review Rights and freedoms publishes this month an issue devoted to the dangers that surveillance capitalism poses to democracy and rights.
In his work The age of surveillance capitalism, the economist Shoshana Zuboff has put forward the notion of surveillance capitalism to account for these realities. She notes an analogy between industrial capitalism in the twentiethe century in the factories of the automaker Ford and the form of capitalism invented by Google at the turn of the 2000s. She explains that: “The digital industry thrives on an almost childish principle: extracting personal data and selling advertisers predictions about user behavior. But, for profits to grow, prognosis must change into certainty. For this, it is no longer enough to predict: it is now a question of modifying human behavior on a large scale. »
Algorithmic processes and those based on artificial intelligence technologies provide a considerable capacity to collect, compile and analyze data on several dimensions of people’s lives and to infer or even anticipate behaviors . According to Shoshana Zuboff, these increased capacities to capture and analyze data and the resulting possibilities for prediction undermine both individual freedoms and the functioning of democracy.
These findings are often greeted with resigned or outraged remarks. Some call for individual reactions of demonization or rejection of connected objects. We lament about the scourges that rage on the Internet without asking too much about the leveling of the laws regulating these virtual spaces.
However, once it has been observed that data is the key resource for capital accumulation, it is important to look closely at the characteristics of these resources which constitute vectors of value creation. It is becoming essential to think about a democratic regulation of the technological processes of value creation associated with great potential for surveillance and other draconian practices.
The individualist impasse
But the implementation of effective regulations is hampered by the persistence in considering the data that each of us produces only as a resource that individuals must protect by consenting to its use. The main practical effect of current laws is to require each user to tick “I consent”. Such a legal framework leaves the field open to practices through which the value of the data can be monopolized by the companies that compile them in order to derive profits, in particular through targeted advertising.
With such a poorly targeted legal framework, the value of data is appropriated by the companies that control the technological devices for capturing and processing data. However, this massive data is a resource emanating from the community. This makes it possible to identify a myriad of phenomena. For example, it is by compiling massive data from, in particular, mobile phones, that it is possible to have real-time information on the state of traffic in a specific sector of a city.
Regulating the processes by which value is generated with data by multiplying the obligations to obtain the “consent” of individuals to use data is not enough. We must restore the ability of states to regulate the activities of this society of surveillance capitalism. We need laws that will determine the rights and obligations of people, individuals, companies and governments in the production of value from data. In addition to strengthening individuals’ control over the information that concerns them, massive data must be given a status consistent with the fact that they are a value-generating resource within “surveillance capitalism”.
The surveillance society should no longer be considered inevitable. Updating legislation is essential to establish the conditions for the operation of activities based on the capture and enhancement of data produced by those who live in connected environments.
This column is on hiatus until August 16.