If the security NSA had attempted to create a monitor that records where we go, what we read and what we are had it been considered lagvidrigt and undemocratic. But nätjättar as Twitter, Google, Instagram and Amazon collects just that kind of information about us, we have a short time accepted as natural.
How Facebook can pull in several billion in profits every year, even though it is completely free to join? It is a question we should ask ourselves more often. Most people have a vague idea about the answer: profits generated by advertising. Targeted advertising. But so what “way”?
The American security expert Bruce Schneier puts it like this: Facebook’s business model is to spy on its users, in order to help companies design their marketing in a way that gives it much greater accuracy than the advertising that is awarded in regular mailboxes or published in newspapers . And it is this, of course not alone. Mass surveillance for commercial purposes has long been the dominant business idea on the internet, with all the major players: Twitter, Google, Instagram – you name it. As Schneier puts it in a slogan already quoted extensively by many commentators: “When something is free on the Internet, it is no longer you are the customer. Then you are the product. ”
Targeted marketing has evolved into a fairly sophisticated operation. In a podcast Schneier describes an experiment which examined how people react when their own face appear in ads targeted to them. Almost everyone thinks that it feels weird, so this approach does not seem so appropriate if you want to sell a product. But, it turns out, if you instead assume a neutral model face then appropriately modulated based on an image of the person’s own face, so that the end result will be something similar to, but not obviously resemble your face – then it is possible to get to an unreflective recognition effect which may be commercially successful.
I do not know if the technology has actually been put to use. But it says something about the level of what is going on. Maybe worth reflecting on the next time you post a selfie on Instagram. Or a picture of your child. Schneier’s book “Data and Goliath. The hidden battles to collect your data, and control your world “(WW Norton & Co.), which came last year has already received much attention, even here in Sweden. Among other Schneier visited last fall Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm (the lecture and the subsequent discussion are available on the internet – for free!). Torbjörn Tännsjö also spent a thoughtful book review in the Journal of Political Philosophy; I will return to some of Tännsjös comments.
After Edward Snow Dens gigantic revelations in 2013 – by far the largest intelligence leak in world history – it is possible to write a book Schneier on a solid basis of documents, rather than starting from anonymous verbal information. Something Snowdendokumenten made overwhelmingly clear is that virtually everything we do on the Internet continuously recorded and stored. As Schneier notes of his own book: if you read it on Amazon’s e-reader Kindle, so sign Amazon is not only that you read the book, but exactly which pages you read and what you miss, if you read the book in one go, or just a bit of time, which sections you select, and so on.
Yes, just that you and everyone around you always carry around a mobile phone means that the location you are and have been, the people you spent time with, who you spend the night with, and so on.
And very many of these data are forwarded to national security. But something Schneier emphasizes that the possibility of mass surveillance was not originally these security services work, but was created by the commercial operators. It was not that the NSA one day suddenly decided to construct the system of mass surveillance. Rather, it was discovered that commercial operators already engaged in mass surveillance and mass storage of data; and so determined to simply to request a copy.
Yes, something else had in fact been unthinkable. Suppose that the security service directly come up with proposals that each citizen would be equipped with tracking equipment that makes it possible to follow her wherever she goes, and identify which she meets; she as soon as she gets himself a new friend should report it to the police; her reading habits systematically mapped to the smallest detail. All these proposals were immediately imposed not only abusive, but as contrary to the democratic society fundamentals.
The security services are still gaining such powers is in itself not surprising, says Schneier: intelligence services inherent logic is and always has been to gather all the materials you can get. But is it for safety reasons? It is understandable that the Internet’s commercial actors engage in mass surveillance: it gives them really unprecedented opportunities to get more people to buy their products. They just follow the logic of the market to maximize profits, and do not really care about whether it is right Mr. A or Mrs. B who pay for their goods – as long as they get the money. But what the security services want’s to identify particular individuals’ intentions, doings in order to anticipate and prevent criminal activities by terrorist acts. Is mass surveillance really to no decisive help in this regard? Schneier believes that the answer to that question is no. When it comes to the ability to stop terrorist attacks have mass surveillance under him at most a marginal effect – an effect that is not at all worth the price we as citizens and society pays when we submit ourselves to such a far-reaching insight into our private lives.
Not that Schneier is against all monitoring. What he argues is that the monitoring that really helps and is needed to targeted surveillance, focusing on specific individuals and groups. A massive indiscriminate collection of data, however, even be counterproductive, by the haystack grows and makes the needle more difficult to find. The relevant dots will be harder to find and bind together when it should be done against a bustling backdrop of irrelevant noise.
The reason that politicians still defend mass surveillance, according to Schneier, that they are simply afraid to be blamed for a terrorist act occurs, and they are not in the public eye “done everything” to prevent it. David Cameron justified its refusal to accept the ECJ’s rejection of the European Data Retention Directive 2014 precisely such terms: “I’m simply not prepared to be a prime minister who, after a terrorist attack must explain to people that I could have done more to prevent the . “Schneier wants the elected shows growing democratic maturity than that – and that our media acts in a way that allows this. Wishful Thinking he?
In his review of the book Schneier question Torbjörn Tännsjö to targeted surveillance would be more desirable than mass surveillance. Tännsjös reason is that mass surveillance is effective from a safety point of view – he does not question that Schneier is right that the alleged efficiency is an illusion. His reasons are rather targeted monitoring is discriminatory: “Would not it be better if all were included, it would not be better, both from the legal certainty that legal security standpoint? Is not it liberating when differentiation between ordinary decent people and those who are on a different basis or suspicious? ”
It seems to me that Tännsjö guilty of at least two errors in thinking. First, he argues that if the choice is between either mass surveillance or targeted monitoring. But it is clear that no modern state can be satisfied with the mere mass monitor the entire population through data storage, since it would be impossible to conduct such monitoring with the intensity and focus that is required to prevent acts of terrorism and other crimes. Stored data must be screened.
Directed surveillance is therefore necessary anyway. The real choice is between a society where we have both indiscriminate mass surveillance and monitoring directed against specific groups, or a society where we accept targeted surveillance, but before the laws and institutions that severely restricts mass surveillance.
Tännsjö says further it difficult to see how the line should be drawn between the mass surveillance and targeted monitoring, and believes that the law would not make any difference: the authorities and security services will anyway get their hands on everything they want to know about us and our activities. But where I think he’s wrong. The distinction between mass surveillance and targeted monitoring is normative and legal: in terms of whether we should have a society where indiscriminate surveillance is the legal norm, or a society where the starting position is that a person can not be monitored without which the surveillance is allowed only after review and special bowl.
If legislation were introduced that severely restricts the commercial nätaktörernas right to store data about their users, so I think these players at large to obey these laws. Moreover, we should introduce a strong legislation for security services and other authorities only rarely have access to commercially stored data.
Sure, the laws would sometimes circumvented and security would try to usurp information on corrupt manner. But at least we would have a situation where such an abuse is clearly identifiable as just illegal and corrupt, and where there are institutionalized paths to denounce the abuse. To give up the idea of such an arrangement seems to me to give up a cornerstone of democracy.
But does it then really so much if we massaged monitored? If those who have something to hide are discovered, so well it just great? We are honest citizens, we have nothing to hide, have nothing to be afraid of! In tomorrow’s understreckare should I look a little closer at why this method of reasoning does not hold.
Martin Gustafsson is professor of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University.
— source svd.se