đź“… 21 Nov 2021
This is a post that has been floating around in my head in some form or another for some time. I have always been suspicious of the endless economic growth model for various reasons and for over a year now, I have been seriously concerned about internet privacy.
At the same time, I studied business administration and got to sit through endless lectures about why a company needs to pay a PR/design firm $211,000,000 to re-design and roll-out their logo to further their quest for world domination.
Published in 1972, The Limits to Growth was a treatise presented by researchers at MIT that was accepted with about as much praise as Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech.
To be fair to President Carter, it actually looks like immediately after the speech, the reaction wasn’t that terrible. But when gas prices and inflation kicked in soon thereafter, telling people to stop endless consumerism didn’t pan out very well.
Now, I’m an American - I don’t try to hide that. Frankly, I’m appalled nearly every day with our collective insatiable appetite for things. I’m guilty too as I’ve certainly made my fair share of needless purchases. And for fear of putting myself on a pedestal, I’m constantly having to correct. But so many people I talk to don’t even see this as an issue. It would only be shocking if it didn’t have such dire implications. Instead, it’s frightening.
But, how does all of this relate to internet privacy?
Well, also when I was studying business administration, specifically taking several courses in data science and marketing, I started to see the numbers on the type of response rates and ROIs that were possible with targeted advertising. More pointedly, targeted advertising that involves collecting gigabytes or maybe even one day soon, terabytes, of data and then letting a computer decide what you are going to do next.
Why would a company spend a bunch of money on marketing and get a 20% ROI when they could instead pay Facebook (I refuse to use Meta) or Google a little extra money and get a 60-100% ROI (or even higher)?
They wouldn’t.
And therein lies the connection to internet privacy.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon tracking us around the web has become so ubiquitous that most people I talk to can’t seem to remember a time (hint: it wasn’t that long ago) when those companies didn’t exist. A small, but very concerning, subset of that group can’t imagine life without them. And now, even more companies are getting in on the action.
I actually thought about trying to make a career as a data scientist. I was putting in the work, was getting decently skilled at it (enough given my former career that I could have at least gotten a position in management), and was starting to interview with companies. I obviously chose a different route and even though it was for different reasons, I’m so glad now that I did.
EVERYTHING about us has to be documented, tracked, stored, and put into an algorithm so that the tech giants can continue to grow at an unreasonable pace. My business classmates would disagree, but there is no reason Facebook, et al, should be valued the way they are. A case can be made for Amazon, cause they actually buy and sell goods, but Facebook provides nothing of value - except data.
And that’s a huge issue. And that’s why I believe that online privacy will only get harder and harder to achieve. Sure, there will always be new tools created and a lot of the old ones will still work, but tracking and data collection are only going to get more and more intrusive.
You think it’s bad now? Imagine when you have to have a Google/Facebook login to access an unrelated site (this might already exist). Imagine when Google is able to successfully beat out all other browsers, kills their open source Chromium, and then they have a literal monopoly on internet traffic. And if you think Google won’t do that, you’re not getting the point. Plus, you don’t know Google’s history.
All of this is very wordy and I’m bouncing around a lot.
My main point is this: in order to continue to achieve unsustainable growth, which has become a central tenant of the endless economic growth model, companies have to keep collecting more and more data. They can’t do that if you and I try to keep parts of our lives private. So, these privacy invasions are going to get more and more intrusive, more and more severe.
And my biggest fear? Not enough people care. Why convenience is so enticing I’ll never know. Why people are willing to give up their most private health data just to make sure they get their 10000 steps is beyond me. But who am I to judge?
Day 70: #100DaysToOffload
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