Privacy is Power

February 15, 2021
A manifesto demanding the right to privacy in the digital realm, a right firmly in the hands of the tech giants. "If you have the latest Roomba vacuum cleaner, it is probably creating a floor plan of where you live." So writes V�liz, a professor at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, who pairs the observation to a provocative, frightening thought: Imagine the possibilities if an authoritarian regime were to have "a detailed real-time map of every room and building in the world." The temptation to abuse that power would be endless. So it is with the largest tech companies, which relentlessly collect data and write algorithms that are meant to exploit your presence on the internet, and not always in obvious ways. It's not your data that's being bought and sold, she adds, but instead "the power to influence you." While it's fairly benign to be influenced to buy a certain book or laundry detergent, that influence sometimes extends to the acceptance and propagation of vicious, even dangerous political lies. The "data economy" demands resistance, in part because democracies are always on the verge of descending into authoritarian states whose leaders have intentions "that may not favor the likes of you." Such intentions are well served by "surveillance capitalism," and they lead to such well-known episodes as the influence-peddling of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Other civil libertarians have mounted overlapping arguments, but V�liz writes clearly and without hyperbole. She is adamant on certain points: "stay clear of Androids," phones stuffed with pre-installed apps that send data to third parties; avoid internet-of-things products that connect online, since "you don't need a kettle or a washing machine through which you can get hacked"; and demand that government disengage from tech and make it possible for citizens to control their own data. A powerful cri de coeur for technological liberation that merits the attention of every consumer of digital services.

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