Inventor of WWW Calls for tighter regulation of political advertising...
Tim Berners-Lee calls for tighter regulation of online
political advertising
Inventor of the worldwide web described in an open letter
how it has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing on huge pools
of personal data
Tim Berners-Lee:
‘Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly
conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?’
By Olivia Solon in San Francisco Saturday 11 March 2017
19.01 EST Last modified on Sunday 12 March 2017 10.22 EDT
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web,
has called for tighter regulation of online political advertising, which he
says is being used in “unethical ways”.
“We urgently need to close the ‘internet blind spot’ in
the regulation of political campaigning,” he said, writing in an open letter
marking the 28th anniversary of his invention.
The 61-year-old British computer scientist described how
political advertising has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing
on enormous pools of personal data on Facebook and Google. This means that
campaigns create personalised ads for individuals – as many as 50,000
variations each day on Facebook during the 2016 US election, he said.
This can become unethical when voters are pointed to fake
news sites and using messaging to discourage people from turning out to vote,
as the Trump campaign did with certain groups whose support Hillary Clinton
needed to win.
“Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely
different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that
democratic?” Berners-Lee said.
The lack of regulation in political advertising online
was one of three trends that threaten the openness of the web that Berners-Lee
has become “increasingly worried” about over the past year. The others are the
loss of control over our personal data and the spread of misinformation online.
Personal data is the price many of us agree to pay for
free services online, but Berners-Lee points out that “we’re missing a trick”
by letting large data-harvesting companies – such as Google, Facebook and
Amazon – control that information.
“As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of
sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct
control over this data, and chose when and with whom to share it,” he said.
A more pernicious side-effect of this data aggregation is
the way governments are “increasingly watching our every move online” and
passing laws such as the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, which legalises a range
of snooping and hacking tools used by security services that “trample our right
to privacy”. Such surveillance creates a “chilling effect on free speech”, even
in countries that don’t have repressive regimes, he said.
Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected
public data
Berners-Lee’s final concern was that it is too easy for
misinformation to spread on the web, particularly as there has been a huge
consolidation in the way people find news and information online through
gatekeepers like Facebook and Google, who select content to show us based on
algorithms that learn from the harvesting of personal data.
“The net result is that these sites show us content they
think we’ll click on – meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is
surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases can spread like
wildfire,” he said. This allows for people with bad intentions and “armies of
bots” to game the system to spread misinformation for financial or political
gain.
Berners-Lee said that the Web Foundation, the
organisation he founded in 2009 dedicated to improvement and availability of
the web, is working on these issues as part of a five-year strategy.
“It has taken all of us to build the web we have, and now
it is up to all of us to build the web we want – for everyone.”
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