Human rights charity Amnesty International is the latest to call for reform of surveillance capitalism — blasting the business models of &surveillance giants& Facebook and Google in a new report which warns the pair market dominating platforms are &enabling human rights harm at a population scale&.&[D]espite the real value of the services they provide, Google and Facebook platforms come at a systemic cost,& Amnesty warns.
&The companies& surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse.
Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.&&This isn&t the internet people signed up for,& it adds.What most striking about the report is the familiarly of the arguments.
There is now a huge weight of consensus criticism around surveillance-based decision-making — from Apple own Tim Cook through scholars such as Shoshana Zuboff and Zeynep Tufekci to the United Nations — that itself been fed by a steady stream of reportage of the individual and societal harms flowing from platforms& pervasive and consentless capturing and hijacking of people information for ad-based manipulation and profit.This core power asymmetry is maintained and topped off by self-serving policy positions which at best fiddle around the edges of an inherently anti-humanitarian system.
While platforms have become practiced in dark arts PR — offering, at best, a pantomime ear to the latest data-enabled outrage that making headlines, without ever actually changing the underlying system.
That surveillance capitalism abusive modus operandi is now inspiring governments to follow suit — aping the approach by developing their own data-driven control systems to straitjacket citizens — is exceptionally chilling.But while the arguments against digital surveillance are now very familiar what still sorely lacking is an effective regulatory response to force reform of what is at base a moral failure — and one that been allowed to scale so big it attacking the democratic underpinnings of Western society.&Google and Facebook have established policies and processes to address their impacts on privacy and freedom of expression & but evidently, given that their surveillance-based business model undermines the very essence of the right to privacy and poses a serious risk to a range of other rights, the companies are not taking a holistic approach, nor are they questioning whether their current business models themselves can be compliant with their responsibility to respect human rights,& Amnesty writes.&The abuse of privacy that is core to Facebook and Google surveillance-based business model is starkly demonstrated by the companies& long history of privacy scandals.
Despite the companies& assurances over their commitment to privacy, it is difficult not to see these numerous privacy infringements as part of the normal functioning of their business, rather than aberrations.&Needless to say Facebook and Google do not agree with Amnesty assessment.
But, well, they would say that wouldn&t they?Amnesty report notes there is now a whole surveillance industry feeding this beast — from adtech players to data brokers — while pointing out that the dominance of Facebook and Google, aka the adtech duopoly, over &the primary channels that most of the world relies on to engage with the internet& is itself another harm, as it lends the pair of surveillance giants &unparalleled power over people lives online&.&The power of Google and Facebook over the core platforms of the internet poses unique risks for human rights,& it warns.
&For most people it is simply not feasible to use the internet while avoiding all Google and Facebook services.
The dominant internet platforms are no longer ‘optional& in many societies, and using them is a necessary part of participating in modern life.&Amnesty concludes that it is &now evident that the era of self-regulation in the tech sector is coming to an end& — saying further state-based regulation will be necessary.
Its call there is for legislators to follow a human rights-based approach to rein in surveillance giants.You can read the report in full here (PDF).