The Decade Tech Turned Dystopian
The Decade Tech Turned Dystopian
We are complicit in the corporate surveillance state we inhabit.
By Eric Newcomer December 20, 2019, 4:00 AM PST
This was the decade we gave our privacy away.
We took silly personality quizzes on Facebook Inc. that made
Cambridge Analytica possible. We bought phones that tracked our locations
everywhere we went. We plugged in smart speakers that sent recordings of our
most intimate moments to humans overseas for transcription. We
downloaded apps and plug-ins with reckless abandon. We installed security
cameras everywhere. We clicked through terms of services without reading. We
agreed to do whatever it took to make those pesky red badges on our phones
go away. We are complicit in the corporate surveillance state we inhabit.
That doesn't mean we weren't duped. Companies tempted us with
their free services. They downplayed the risks. They broke promises to
safeguard our data. They presented themselves as silly apps, only to become
world-changing communications platforms. They hired psychologists to manipulate
us. They used the money they made from our data to buy lobbyists to fight off
privacy regulations.
The New York Times explained on Thursday just what it means to hand over
the kind of location data collected by our smartphones. The
newspaper painted a terrifying portrait of the self-imposed surveillance
state: “Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would
surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every
person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location
24 hours a day. Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created,
Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private
companies.”
If you’re paying attention, this is not surprising. The Times
wrote an article with many of the same
revelations almost exactly a year ago. Other publications have
been doing similar work for years.
The 2010s should be remembered as the decade tech turned
dystopian. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened just as
Washington was out to lunch. D.C. has been dysfunctional and divided, but
politicians also agreed long ago that their default setting
would be to allow innovation from private enterprises without question.
Since Bill Clinton’s 1996 proclamation that the “era of big government is
over,” corporations have gotten the benefit of the doubt. That has
been particularly true of tech companies.
The new decade could be different, at least tonally. The ’20s will
start with the enactment of America’s first sweeping privacy bill, the
California Consumer Privacy Act. We’ll see where it goes from there, but
government officials have the ability to regulate the markets where
businesses sell or share our sensitive data. They can set restrictions on how long companies can
retain that information, and how they can use it.
It's an open question whether there's the political will to
do this, of course. Federal privacy legislation is stuck. Attempts to shape the
law in California are hardly over, and other states have yet to adopt similar
legislation. The companies with a stake in the status quo are now some of the
most powerful private enterprises on earth.
No matter what happens, I don’t think humanity will ever be able
to undo the decisions we made this decade. It’s too inconvenient to go
backward, and we may have given up privacy for everyone going forward.
Technology companies moved fast and broke things. There may be no
putting them back together.
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