Observations on Surveillance Capitalism, 2023

Posted on Oct 3, 2023

The privacy of end users and the amount of data their phones leak to unknown numbers of third parties is at its highest point. Accepting or rejecting cookies really doesn’t matter: the headers browsers send on every request to any website, and the AS from which you are communicating are likely to be enough to uniquely identify who you are. With Javascript available, there is no chance: the mere combination of width and height your screen display has, your language preferences, and which fonts are installed on your phone are more than likely to provide the 33 bits of entropy required to uniquely identify you as a human being. We are very new to this concept, it’s really unprecedented that we are able to collect and analyze so much data about our global village. For example, just a few seconds of using a VR headset are enough to uniquely identify you, but smarter techniques can be much more efficient at knowing who you are.
States have unprecedented power to control its citizens and shut down dissenting citizens by force. This even happened in Canada, one of the most free countries in the world, which terrified me when it happened. This is not Iran (which also does it), but a western democracy. This is why we need separation of money and state: to prevent ramping authoritarianism.
Big tech companies control not only the services and the data centers required to provide you with the services for which you would pay, but they also have massive control over how your device accesses those services. For example, clicking on a link on Instagram opens it on a “web view” that allows Facebook to collect information about your browsing activities that they wouldn’t necessarily get if you used your own browser. The devil is in the details: even such a small change as redirecting “maps.google.com” to “google.com/maps”, which can be 100% honest for performance and efficiency reasons, results in the inability to prevent Google from tracking what you do in other websites. Where is the opt-out option to pay for a service, without the advertising? Microsoft transmits the contents of the offline version of PowerPoint, without any clue as why Microsoft needs this data, or what is it going to use it for. Their terms and conditions changed very recently, and as usual, the changes are non-negotiable.
We live in a far safer world. Mission accomplished: serial killers are almost a thing of the past thanks to surveillance capitalism. The use of these applications and the actually heroic work of thousands of content reviewers at Facebook, Google, and others allow us to catch really gruesome offenders. Can we get some of our privacy back now? The false positives of these practices, extreme power of the platforms, and lack of due process can lead to really bad outcomes and abuses of power.
We need to amplify more the voices of those people that try to re-vindicate privacy, for the good of our democracies. Even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide, there might be unintended consequences of this massive advertising revenue-driven virtual economy. I simply would like to opt out of Google knowing everything about myself, but looks like this is a very expensive option in today’s world.