THE re-emergence of data privacy issues has once again led to criticism of Facebook. As debate on the massive data breach continues globally, it begs the question: should the news of a giant internet company found guilty of tracking people’s activities in cyberspace in exchange for free access to their platform really be disconcerting?

While it would appear that the situation at hand is dire and capable of triggering a chain reaction that could cause the downfall of Facebook, in a capitalist ecosystem, corporations seldom suffer that fate.

In popular discourse, authoritarianism is often considered the antithesis of capitalism. And there is no other domain than individual privacy where their differences are starker. While under capitalism, a person’s home is perceived as his stronghold, his sanctuary; under authoritarianism, it is nothing more than a monitored cage.

Today, however, privacy is no longer an essential ingredient of capitalist democracies; quite the opposite. Multinational corporations that had once held high the banner of transparency are leading the charge against individual privacy — metaphorical to Orwell’s 1984.

Contrary to popular belief, the war being waged against individual privacy by ‘Big Brother’ is not something that surfaced when CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden took centre stage, but had been a work in progress ever since the internet hit puberty in the ’90s. On one hand, founders of tech corporations were the flagbearers of a technological revolution that birthed the internet, on the other they foresaw the future of marketing: targeted advertising of the individual by personalising ad experience.

MNCs are leading the charge against individual privacy.

At first glance, a customised ad experience seems like an organic, more efficient approach to advertising through which a user could be shown ads of relevance only, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

A look under the hood, however, reveals a more sinister truth: if you’re not paying to use a product on the internet then you are the product!

To give perspective, say in the pre-internet times you wanted to sell sporting goods to a customer. You figure out a target demographic between the ages of 13- to 30-year-olds guessing for the most part what kind of sporting equipment people from that specific demographic would be interested in.

In the digital world embedded AI systems do the calculations for you. Every status you like, every comment you make, every picture you upload, every message you send is collated and quantified. If you start to type a comment on Facebook and delete it midway, Facebook analyses that information.

At every step of the way your online activities are collected and fed to machine-learning algorithms to learn the characteristics of the people who like to purchase sporting goods, and then apply those characteristics to a wide sample of population to pinpoint and classify individuals likely to buy sporting goods.

Making such intricate, large-scale calculations requires enormous amounts of data, increasingly referred to as big data. Conse­quently, deep surveillance becomes essential for corporations that require large chunks of data to make their algorithms compute better. That’s why Facebook as well as other tech giants yearn for your private data so that they can compile the most accurate information about your personality traits and sell to advertisers a more robust marketing platform which ensures a steady revenue stream. For enterprises, individual privacy is a small price to pay to see the business flourish.

Zuckerberg’s 10-hour grilling by Congress presents the façade of a CEO being held responsible for his strategic decisions at the helm of a comp­any he co-foun­ded. There is talk of regulation and concerns shown by members of Congress on what privacy means in the digital age. The flip side, how­­­ever, reveals the influence Face­book exerts during elections and how the sheer outreach of the platform can shape political opinion among the masses.

Obama’s campaign utilised the platform to profile the voter demographic; Trump’s campaign took it to the next level by developing micro-targeted content in collaboration with data-mining firms to help sway the electorate in his favour. It is no accident that Facebook is among the biggest donors to the very members of Congress its CEO testified in front of. Would regulating a platform that is essential for their political future — not to mention that donates generously to their campaigns — really be in the best interest of politicians apparently raising eyebrows?

Facebook’s stock price which seemed to have nosedived when revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the airwaves, quickly gained lost ground in wake of its CEO’s testimony before Congress. Wall Street has given its verdict: User data is the new oil. Personal IDs, though cannot be bought or paid for (yet), can still be owned, sold and controlled by a vibrant advertising industry for billions in profits.

The writer is a researcher.

Twitter: @fahadamalik

Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2018