Privacy And Technology In A Global Age

Introduction

Early 2018 has seen one of the most large-scale privacy scandal, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal ¹. On April 10, 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during his testimony to the U.S. Congress, explained that the breach resulted from, in 2013, an app that harvests Facebook data built by a Cambridge University researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, and the gathered social network data of millions of users were, without user knowledge, given to an agency that specializes in mining data for targeted political interference campaigns.

Although Facebook has a long history of scandals, it is not the only company that has privacy-related issues, Google, Sony, Disney, and several others, too have been revealed in the past to have unlawfully collected or leaked user information. In 2012, Google was under fire because of their policy change on Adsense and Analytics, and in 2016, Google was again criticized for quietly releasing ban on collection of de-identificable information on DoubleClick.

In this paper, I shall briefly introduce how the privacy concerning technologies came to become the way it is now, and further discuss its implications and concerns in our current globalized world.

The Internet

Since the latter half of the 20th century, computing technologies has grown to become one of the most critical infrastructures in the modern world. Along with the development of network engineering and the conception of the Internet, the invention of the World Wide Web by British engineer Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN has made an unprecedented influence on the and societal structure and sparked generations of network-enabled applications that consequently altered the ways humans connect with each other.

The Business

Among all the new curiosities that people have built on the Internet, services and businesses that flourish on their user market share, motivated by the investment strategies of the venture capital providers ², ³, ⁴ and perpetuated by the endless stream of viral success stories ⁵ about ``unicorn’’ companies that cash in on their ubiquity, have secured immense permeability and control over the interactions with their end users.

Of these software companies, one particular model which has attracted a copious amount of followers is those with ``free’’ products. Google provides for free almost all of their services to non-commercial users. Regular users will never pay Facebook a dime for using any of their features. We post pictures of our dinner gathering on Instagram without any second thought, and we share the latest movies we watched on Twitter with joy and excitement.

In 2012, there were more than 1 billion active Facebook users, and as of the end of 2017, that number has surpassed 2.2 billion ⁶. Gmail, one of the most prominent and popular products of Google, had been reported in 2016 to have over 1 billion active users ⁷. And, in 2017, Twitter had over 300 millions users using it at least monthly ⁸.

The online network of Internet users that stretches across the world has made it almost essential for people to have an online presence. People in America may have ``friends’’ across the globe with any of them instantly accessible through the platform, and, at the same time, your neighbors next door and old friends from high school all want to connect with you via one of the social networks.

In this global age, it is inescapable for average people from the reaches of these digital portals, and yet, most people don’t have the slightest intent to shun, either.

The Optimism

Because of how embedded these services are in our life, we are often overly optimistic about the consequences of using them. We voluntarily give up a plethora of personal information to spruce up our ``profile’’ pages, thinking only about the delivery of that information to other users while giving the platforms and services provides complete trust over their intentions.

There has been a sense of ``generalized trust’’, such that people naively waive doubts ⁹, which has been leading people to neglect the potential concerns and even crisis that may arise from using these products, and it is even more so in the West than it is in the East, where people expect general goodwill and benign intent of others ¹⁰.

It is argued that the relational mobility of a society, the measure of how dynamic interpersonal relationships are in social contexts ¹¹, correlates with the average degree of generalized trust in that society, as is the case for U.S. and Japan, where there are higher relational mobility and generalized trust in former and lower in latter ⁹, ¹².

Yet, according to Pew Research ¹³, being in control of who can get information about us is ``very important’’ to 74\% of Americans. It is perhaps this very trust that permeates the West that propelled these companies this far, but in a global age, when they are expanding, this difference may be the key factor that some companies, such as Twitter, which is more reputable than some other, such as Facebook which has experienced countless scandals, as far as privacy is concerned, succeeded in specific markets, such as Japan.

The Trap

Little people care to bat an eye on, let alone wade through, the often otherwise ignored terms of services which are all too often designed to confuse and obfuscate so that people with little legal background would have a very hard time deciphering to what they’re actually consenting.

Moreover, obstacles like these that causes little nuisances are in fact everywhere, from making the option to opt out difficult to locate to making removal of user accounts almost impossible to achieve by burying the option deep inside the interface. In 2010, Harry Brignull, an independent user experience consultant, coined the term ``dark patterns’’ ¹⁴ to describe techniques like these where companies deliberately try to thwart user effort to understand the details or to withhold given information.

Globalization fueled the dark patterns even more, as Western companies set up shops in other countries, they bring along all the tricks they’ve honed over the years to places that have yet to experience any of it. For example, the disparate domination ¹⁵ of different social networks across countries may make it difficult for users to adjust.

However, it’s not just the Western companies. Asian tech companies, which have enjoyed rapid boom over the past decade in China, have now developed a whole new style of user interface design with poor usability ¹⁶ to non-native users, which may result in another one of the dark patterns, in the reverse order.

The Technology

The field of data science has made tremendous strides in the past decade, thanks to the maturation of hardware and the widespread adoption of data gathering devices, such as environment sensors and social networks.

The sheer amount of data from various sources combined could potentially reveal otherwise unauthorized private information about people. For example, the data used for Netflix Prize, an open competition on collaborative filtering algorithm, was found by Narayanan and Shmatikov ¹⁷ to suffer from serious privacy vulnerabilities, costing Netflix a lawsuit thereafter.

Sweeney ¹⁸ proposed one of the first privacy protection model of data releasing. With the advent of big data and machine learning, the demand of such techniques increases with each passing years, as more data providers seek ways to employ new technologies while upholding the promises of protecting user data.

In ¹⁸, Sweeney demonstrated that, at as early as 1997, the voter registration data of Cambridge, Massachusetts sold by the city government and the health insurance data of state employees sold by the Group Insurance Commission (GIC) can be linked together to uniquely re-identify some personal medical information with only ZIP code, birth date, and gender. For example, the governor of Massachusetts then, William Weld, is the only man with that particular birth date in that ZIP code.

Today, people across the world are increasingly concerned about ``avoidance, opt-out and proactive protection’’ ¹⁹ of their privacy, and with each region having its specific needs of such protection. In a global age, this demands privacy-preserving techniques which correspond to different people. However, latest privacy research, such as transparent or differential approach, are still not widely used in industries, save for some experimental trial such as ²⁰, ²¹.

Comment

There is also the aspect of policy-making and legislation to privacy, which influences how enterprises act to a certain degree. An important progress this year is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ²² that replaced Data Protection Directive in European Union law.

Adopted in 2016 and became enforceable in May 2018, it regulates privacy and data protection. Being considered one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching law in the privacy domain, the outcome of it is widely anticipated, as some companies have scrambled in recent months to modify their policies to meet such standards ²³, ²⁴, while some choose to leave the E.U. market altogether ²⁵.

Since the regulation applies to all individuals within the European Union, its effect reaches beyond the E.U. itself. Any multi-national companies and even foreign agencies with establishments in or that wish to operate in the E.U. regions have to comply with the law. Thus, GDPR is poised to become the first privacy legislation with global consequences.

I shall omit more detailed discussion on the legal side of the topic, because I am not that familiar with it, and also because GDPR is yet to take effect, so I believe the most crucial part of its history is just beginning.

Conclusion

Despite the long-hauled neglect, in recent year, privacy concerns have been brought to light because of several severe scandals of the now infamous Internet giants. I believe with continued public attention, popular beliefs, as well as legislative supervision, would soon catch up with the reality, and, in time, countries across the world would come to an agreement over the privacy issues and work jointly to protect it.

References