“Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can do. As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected to the people they love, for making their voices heard, and for building communities and businesses. But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. And that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”
This was the opening statement of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, in a hearing before the US Congress. It followed the revelation that the personal data of 87 million Facebook users had been used to influence voter opinion in the run-up to the 2016 US election. Zuckerberg’s words caused shock waves throughout the social media community. Many people simply saw such platforms as a fun and secure way to share photos and socialise.
SAFE SHARING
The Facebook scandal and the public’s reaction to it show the way that we feel about our privacy is changing. Before the digital age only our closest friends would see our family photos. This is no longer the case, but we still want to be able to choose who we share this information with. In the digital age we may be willing to share more information about ourselves than before, but only when it is our choice to do so. That choice should not be taken from us.
ABUSE OF PRIVACY
The right to privacy has existed since the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and for good reason. In Nazi Germany in 1939, the state census required all citizens to identify themselves by race and religion. The result of this was that Jewish citizens were required to carry an ID card, identifying themselves as Jewish. A terrible consequence of this abuse of privacy was that it became easier for the Nazis to identify the six million Jews who they murdered in the Holocaust.
THE FIGHT CONTINUES
Without doubt, the way we feel about our privacy will continue to evolve, and we will keep inventing new ways to protect it. In May this year, the European Parliament passed a new privacy law, the General Data Protect Regulation, which will force corporations like Google and Amazon to ensure that their users know, understand and consent to how their data is being used. Additionally, consumers will for the first time have the right to access the data companies’ store on us and the right to correct that information if we find it to be wrong. As long as we continue to innovate in response to new threats we can say that we still care very much about our privacy.
The COLLECTIVE BRAIN
Deirdre Mulligan is Faculty Director of the Center for Law & Technology of the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on privacy, freedom of expression and fairness is considered groundbreaking. But, as Speak Up discovered, Professor Mulligan still chooses to have an online presence. We asked her if she would ever choose to opt out of technology, knowing all she does about its risks to our privacy.
Deirdre Mulligan (American accent): I think like everyone else technology has made my life richer and fuller in many ways. I’m a very selective user of technology. I’m an early adopter of things that I view as going to provide me with real value, but I do not adopt things just because everybody else is doing them. I don’t have a Facebook account. I don’t have a Twitter. I don’t need them. I don’t need any more ways for people to reach me.
GOOGLE KNOWS ALL
Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier made the comment that “Google knows me better than my wife!” We asked Professor Mulligan if people are aware of how much information they are handing over about themselves when they do a Google search.
Deirdre Mulligan: One of my PhD students just finished her PhD, her dissertation. And things she was looking at were searched. And in those qualitative interviews asking people how they felt about it, people were very aware of the amount of information and the intimate profile that Google in particular as a search engine. About their romantic life, and their health, and housing prices, and the diet they’re going on and where they should take a vacation, and what vitamins they should be taking, all of these questions. They’re fully aware. If you wanted to blackmail people, Google is sitting on the mother lode. And it was interesting because people do this, and people also will talk about Google as the collective brain because in many ways it’s not just that they have all of your stuff, they have everybody’s stuff. So, people really feel like Google has a lot of power in their life, but they also feel like they get a pretty big benefit because my knowledge is, you know, this much better because you contributed, too. And so there is some appreciation of the pooled resource that we get. But yeah, people are, when you talk to them, very aware of how leveraged they are with Google.
THE EU vs. THE US
Professor Mulligan then went on to suggest why Europeans today may feel more secure about their privacy than Americans.
Deirdre Mulligan: You also have to remember that during the Nazi era there were enormous misuses of state-collected data, census data, all sorts of population registries, medical records. All of those pieces of information were misused and helped identify people, helped take people away. So, while I think that Europeans may be less fearful of the state having data in a general way, that is probably, in part, because they feel like there’s lots of limitations that have been placed on what they can do with the information.