Читать книгу Infoselves - Demetra Garbasevschi - Страница 6

Over the course of our lives, we experience moments that have the power to bring us sudden clarity and insight over aspects of our lives that we had misunderstood, misinterpreted, or simply failed to notice. As a global society, we are equally exposed to moments of collective revelation that fracture the status quo, opening new perspectives and courses of action. These are not necessarily moments of historical magnitude and can be as mundane as the last day of April 2019.

It was the day of the Facebook F8 developer conference, an event dedicated to tech creators and consumers, where the company usually introduces its latest technological updates, pitching product novelties or proprietary tools to reaffirm its position as leader and innovator. The edition of 2019 announced itself to be remarkably different. Facebook had been under a long siege following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since the reveal of Facebook’s part in one of the biggest political campaign schemes of our times, the accusations toward the company had been cascading. In retrospect, the known offences fell under at least three categories. First, there were the unintended errors in personal data handling. Various bugs allowed the hacking of 30 million accounts in September 2018 or the open availability of the private photos of almost seven million users to third-party developers in December 2018 (Lapowsky 2018). Then, there was the intentional third-party data sharing. In December 2018, Facebook’s alleged secret deals with over one hundred and fifty major companies, among which Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix, were made public. Under these contracts, Facebook was deceitfully unlocking the private data of users for its partners’ use (Dance et al. 2018). Finally, there was the lenience towards the use of the platform, allowing for the spread of fake news, hate speech, or the congregation of individuals and groups with a shady agenda, leading to tragedies such as the violent street riots targeting Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Lapowsky 2018). The company’s image had been suffering hit after hit, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before US Congress. In 14 years since the creation of Facebook – the online social network that changed the way individuals interact and engage in social relationships worldwide – this was the first significant attempt to define and attribute accountability. Zuckerberg’s unprecedented testimony was interpreted in many ways at the time. What is nevertheless visible to anyone watching the recording on YouTube is that it evokes both humanistic intentions and unsettling acts of power. By F8, the list of Facebook’s known offences had become so long and so grim, causing disruptions to the company’s financial indicators, that amends were vital. Mark Zuckerberg chose to play a risky card, one he had recently been toying with. In his keynote address on the first day of the F8 conference, he promised to completely rewire Facebook around the very thing it was accused of lacking: privacy. A new commitment (a private future for its users) and a poetical claim (“privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves”) pointed to Facebook’s rewritten mantra.

No matter if we choose to believe or disbelieve Zuckerberg’s announcement regarding the intention to redefine his company around the value of privacy, we cannot ignore the historical significance of the moment. Facebook’s leader was publicly cornered into an unprecedented move; his was the only possible response to appease (even if temporarily) the snowball effect of recent revelations. In many ways, affirming the new objective of Facebook legitimized a cultural tension that had been building up around the idea of privacy in the age of hyperconnectivity, to the point of transforming privacy into a societal turning point. Two explanations seem necessary here. On the one hand, it should be clarified that we are referring to informational privacy – the “freedom from informational interference or intrusion, achieved thanks to a restriction on facts … that are unknown or unknowable” about someone (Floridi 2014a, p. 103). On the other hand, we should not forget that privacy is a social construct, like freedom, justice, or power. As such, it can be understood differently by different people, in different circumstances. In a post-Internet society, it is logical to assume that ideas and expectations of informational privacy have changed from those we held before our collective datafication. Digital technologies of connectivity can be deployed to both decrease and increase informational friction, making personal information more available or less so (depending on knowledge and intent), and therefore both eroding and enhancing informational privacy (2014a). The cultural tension mentioned earlier is the result of our failure to project the consequences of this dual role. Our frontstage experience with being empowered to exert certain levels of control over our personal information online has prevented us from observing the systematic informational intrusion that unfolded backstage.

Since the emergence of social media, users have chosen to share information about themselves in an environment that they knew little about. It was not unreasonable to assume their personal data belonged to them, or at least that it was treated with care since, through their structural organization, platforms gave the impression of a controlled type of sharing. Users did not spend too much of their time questioning this assumption. The reality we have been confronted with in recent years is that we could not have been more wrong. Once released online, our personal information is no longer ours. What is more, our data does not consist solely of the information we have historically uploaded and, theoretically, have the option to control. Online, we make hundreds of choices every day that speak about who we are. The data behind these choices is transparent to the platforms we interact on but remains invisible to us. The commercial system set in place by the Internet’s key players has benefited abundantly from this loophole, while we have had no knowledge about how our personal information was collected, interpreted, or repurposed. Connecting online personal information to offline real individuals has become the founding principle of a new economic system: the identity economy, allowing for the commodification of identity at a scale never encountered before. The mass harvesting of personal information online was possible through a methodical erosion of our informational privacy. Not only have the Cambridge Analytica and similar reveals altered our collective experience of privacy (we now, for example, expect constant surveillance online), but they have also pointed out that an erosion of informational privacy can be perceived as a direct attack on our self-identity, as our online identities are unquestionably constituted by our information.

While we benefited from legal frameworks protecting our identities in the real world, the territory of our online identities represented, until recently, a vast and unchartered gray area. The need to create effective regulation to safeguard our identities in the online environment became increasingly pressing once mass claims to our online identities made by various entities were undeniably exposed. In 2012, the European Union (EU) Commission was assembling a think tank and research group called the “Onlife Initiative.” Its members, reputed thinkers of our time, had the mission to advise the EU in the formulation of its digital strategy, assessing the impact of information and communication technologies on individuals and society and setting the ground for future policy. The product of this collective effort, synthesized in a document titled “Onlife Manifesto” (Floridi 2014b), pointed to our irreversible digital transformation. The word “onlife” itself, a term coined by Luciano Floridi (2011), is revealing of the way information and communication technologies have altered the fabric of our living environment and through it, the nature of our very existence. In a hyperconnected world, we are never totally on nor completely off. Consequently, our identities are inevitably constructed and performed within this merged informational environment that has unnoticeably become our natural habitat. The “Onlife Manifesto” had signaled the need to adjust our conceptual framework to a new reality, before any legal framework could be imagined and implemented.

This was 2012. Only two years later, the actions of one single individual set in motion a chain reaction that accelerated the adoption of legislation aimed at protecting the identity of individuals in the online environment. Following the complaint of a Spanish citizen, directed at Google Spain, Google Inc, and a local newspaper, about outdated and unjustly incriminating personal data appearing in searches, the EU Court of Justice ruled in favor of “the right to be forgotten,” taking a first step in the legal protection of personal information online (European Court of Justice 2014). Citizens of the European Union now had the power to request search engines like Google to remove search results based on a person’s name, if the information included in these results was inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive. From June 2014 to April 2019, Google had received 801,659 queries in connection with the “right to be forgotten,” requesting the removal of 3,124,642 URLs, according to Google Transparency Policy (2019). What is more useful to note is that the number of requests has grown annually and that almost 90% of these requests were originated by private individuals. Not all requests find their resolution. Google makes it clear that they are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, taking into account criteria such as the importance of personal information to the general public or the position and history of the person requesting the removal. The rights to privacy and data protection are therefore analyzed against other values, rights, or interests, for example freedom of speech or freedom of access to information. Moreover, this being EU legislation, it applies to EU citizens only (URLs that appear in European search results are delisted; also, with the use of geolocation signals, access to a certain URL from the country of the requester is restricted). Yet it affects any company outside of the EU targeting EU citizens. By defending the right of European individuals to personal data protection online, the “right to be forgotten” was the first breakthrough in founding a global legislative system able to protect the identities of individuals in the online environment.

What followed is by now notorious. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), a historic change in personal data protection legislation, was adopted by the European Parliament (2016) and has been enforced since 2018 in all EU countries. European Union citizens benefit from a common legal framework that limits their exposure as data subjects and allows them to question the collection, storage, and use of any personal information online. Looking at the definition of “personal data” provided by the European Commission (n.d., online), we can understand how, by stipulating how their personal data can be handled, the premise of regulation is to protect the identities of individuals:

Personal data is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual. Different pieces of information, which collected together can lead to the identification of a particular person, also constitute personal data. Personal data that has been de-identified, encrypted or pseudonymised but can be used to re-identify a person remains personal data and falls within the scope of the GDPR.

The GDPR, still in its infancy and still to prove its long-term efficiency, succeeded in setting a global regulatory standard that pressured consistent followership from other countries around the world. In the US, where Silicon Valley exercises a major economic influence and acts as an important consultative pillar for this type of legislative decision, a federal law with a scope similar to that of the GDPR is yet to be designed and enforced. In the meantime, there have been various signals that such a regulatory initiative is long overdue. Facebook has received a fine of US$5 billion, the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for breaches of consumer privacy, and 20 times greater than any similar penalty ever imposed worldwide (Federal Trade Commission 2019). In a May 2019 op-ed in The New York Times, Chris Hughes – one of Facebook’s initial five co-founders – openly advocated for the breakup of Facebook and sustained regulatory reform:

For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive.

(Hughes 2019)

Hughes refers to Facebook’s successive moves towards insulating itself from competition: in 2012, it acquired Instagram and, in 2014, WhatsApp. Hughes’s argument is based on the claim that the resulting colossus is both too powerful and too dangerous. Breaking it up would ensure healthy competition, while regulating it would prevent further abuses of power. What is noteworthy to mention is that Facebook’s response to Hughes’s plea, although expectedly not in favor of dismantling the company, acknowledges the long overdue need for tight regulation:

We are in the unusual position of asking for more regulation, not less. … Anyone worried about the challenges we face in an online world should look at getting the rules of the internet right.

(Clegg 2019)

It is difficult to predict what a comprehensive legal framework covering all aspects of the online environment – personal, social, and commercial – would look like, or the effects of implementing unifying regulation at a global scale to companies and individuals. From a broader perspective, there is no precedent validated by history to guide lawmakers in approaching such a gargantuan task. The turmoil surrounding the repetitive offences of Facebook and those of other platforms points to the deficiency of existing laws and, at the same time, reveals a system that has been operating in retrospect. For too long, the online environment had been regulating itself. Only when flagrant consequences transpired did boundaries begin to be erected one by one. Yet, continuing to design and enforce legislation for the online environment is not a straightforward task. Going back to the goal of the “Onlife Initiative,” we must be ready to update our conceptual framework in order to be able to understand and address the never-ending challenges related to our digitization as a global society.

I have digressed: this is not a book about the trajectory of Facebook or social media, nor is it a book about regulation in the online environment, although both are crucial aspects that define where we are and help set the scene for the discussion proposed here. This is a book about each and every individual that is incessantly connected to this new social reality made possible through digital technologies of connectivity. In the face of the immense and still unchartered landscape that is the online environment, the importance and perspective of the single individual can be easily overlooked. Yet the individual is the most significant unit of a new value system; in that quality they need thorough consideration and protection, sometimes from their very own actions.

Every society in the world has the mission to equip its young with the tools to navigate social life and thus become social individuals, part of the larger community. From a very early age we are taught the norms, values, and customs of our society. We learn from our parents, educators, and role models what is good and what is bad, what is socially acceptable and what is not. We are shown how do behave in certain social circumstances and what are the consequences if we do not conform. This lengthy process that can last a lifetime is called socialization. While socialization comes with numerous dos and don’ts for conventional living, it does not yet include an online package. Much as the legal system, the social system has been caught off guard by the speed and the spread of the online engagement of its members. How exactly do we socialize the young for an environment that is more familiar to them than to the older members of society, the very ones that are supposed to be in charge of socialization? From this perspective, we could say that socialization has been going through a process of reversal. It is the young who have often socialized the older members of society to be equipped to take part in the digital world, an idea David Altheide introduced as early as 1995 (Altheide 1995). But this happens mostly at a technical level and escapes the problematic territory of values and norms. The reality is that the young have received no social training to help them navigate onlife. The approach of parents has mostly been one of uncritical adoption of digital technology. One of the well-being specialists I have interviewed insightfully remarks:

Unfortunately, parents are losing their ability to parent because their automatic response is to give [their children] a phone, an iPad and to say watch this, play this.

(Mark Wentworth)

Schools around the world have, in their turn, only more recently begun to introduce digital literacy classes and the effects of these programs are difficult to evaluate at this point.

Considering this context, defining who we are and who we should be in the online environment has been mostly left to the commercial entities that operate the Internet economy. While we have been under the illusion that we can decide what to share about ourselves and who to share it with, we have been unknowingly and collectively led to share more and more personal information by an increasingly compelling online experience. This addictive loop can represent a development threat to the younger members of society. A quote from a 17-year-old included in a 2017 report on digital childhood by the UK’s 5 Rights Foundation¹ is revealing for the exposed position of children and teens and points to the importance of formal online socialization:

There should be some sort of education in the general education system not only about all the sort of cyberbullying and stuff, but just generally about how the internet and companies on the internet work … and they’re not necessarily doing everything in your favour. Yes, it is great – the internet is amazingly useful, but you have to sort of know how to behave, not just about towards other people but how much data you should be giving out and what’s realistically going to be happening to it.

(Kindron and Rudkin 2017)

The commercial system of the Internet has perpetuated a tacit exchange that is by now widely acknowledged. It has granted users free access in return for their personal data. Asked, during his Congress interrogation, how his company is able to sustain a business model in which users do not pay for service, Mark Zuckerberg bemusedly replied: “Senator, we run ads!” In the book Paid Attention, author Faris Yakob appeals to a much-used phrase that is descriptive of this deal: “If you are not paying for an online service, then you are the product being sold” (2015, p. 59). While the reality of the online economy is more complex than this logic implies, it does revolve around the commodification of identity online, understood as its transformation into a valuable resource. The volume of information that people share intentionally or unintentionally about themselves every second means that entire life narratives can be reconstructed from various types of available data. The intention is not to simply connect this online data to a living, breathing individual in order to identify them. What is more important is to understand who that individual is, based on their online behavior patterns – including likes, dislikes, interests, groups, causes, or shopping and consumption habits – in order to build a reliable profile. Profiling allows for individuals to be classified into targetable values and lifestyle categories. Advertisers and other entities rely on the accuracy of these categories for their persuasive interests. Yet to say that commercial entities are the only ones to profit from the commodification of online identities would make a false claim. For the individuals themselves, online identity can be a driver of value, or – the opposite – of digital irrelevance or even stigma. Hence, the digital work put into producing an online identity able to potentially generate social or economic outcomes. This direction was set by the first user making a revenue as a result of their online profile (the term influencer had not yet emerged at the time) and has rapidly produced an economy of its own.

The phenomenon of online identity has become so important, so complex, and so problematic to individuals and society that it requires our full awareness and a relentless commitment to further exploration. And, while there has been steady progress in its observation and analysis (through the consistent contributions of social sciences and humanities researchers and writers, some of them highlighted throughout this book), we are undoubtedly only beginning to understand the meanings and consequences of extending our personal identities online at a global scale. Just like a collage that puts together existing materials to create new art, what this book offers is to put into perspective what has been said and written, in order to open doors towards new ways of looking at online identity as a phenomenon of our times. The focus remains on the identity of the individual, as opposed to, for example, the group or community, yet an individual who is naturally engaged in a diversity of social interactions. As such, of main concern are the external practices of identity construction and performance, as opposed to the internal processes of identity negotiation, although the constant dialogue between self-concepts, personal, and social identity is self-implied. The tension between the term “online identity” and the ideas presented throughout this book might have already become evident. “Online identity” implicitly positions itself versus its offline counterpart. Alluding to a separation between the online and the real-life selves leads to an ideology that is no longer sustainable in a hyperconnected world. Still, as with many other concepts, there is no widely accepted substitute and we continue to need this concept in order to explain a constellation of other ideas. Finally, the underlying red thread of the book is the idea of identity commodification. In a highly digitized society, we are our information and this information holds value for various stakeholders, including ourselves. The term “commodification” has historically been burdened with negative connotations. When preceded by the word “self” to form “self-commodification,” the negative effect is only amplified. The perspective of this book is grounded on the idea that the reputation of commodification is worth salvaging. Self-commodification can be neither good nor bad, as long as it is acknowledged and consented to by all parties involved in the exchange. It is only when we recognize this vantage point that we can begin to understand how we can capitalize on the value of our online identities.