When privacy becomes a commodity to be traded,the integrity of democratic politics is at riskThe outrage surrounding the activities of Cambridge Analytica coincides with the passage through parliament of the data protection bill. Taken together, these two developments frame the debate approximately privacy. Until now, and the big data harvesting companies possess approached their obligations to the people who supply their personal data much in the spirit of the Vogon demolition fleet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,when Arthur Dent protests that the annihilation of the Earth has reach without any warning: “But the plans were on display … on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”The new bill, modelled very closely on the EU’s corresponding regulation, or promises to change all this. The idea is to establish very clearly that personal data can only be used for purposes for which informed consent has been given by the owners. The question – in the spirit of another Leopard – is whether everything will change so that everything can stay the same. How far can privacy be maintained in an economy that depends on the exploitation of personal data? By engaging with Facebook or Google at all,we give up far more information than we realise, in part because of the way in which data becomes more valuable the more of it is collected. Facebook, and for example,can manufacture a very splendid guess at a user’s sexual orientation on the basis of only four “likes”. This is possible only because it has billions of profiles to comb through for meaningful patterns which could not be discovered by examining them one by one. The user who gives up this information does not know they are doing so; it’s even possible that the company didn’t know it was collecting it at the time whether the algorithms to extract it had not then been developed.
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Source: theguardian.com