If you use the Internet and carry a smart phone, it’s likely that most of your life is being tracked – your browsing history, your monthly income, the grocery store aisles in which you linger. The detailed information government and corporations now collect about us has huge practical ramifications. In her book Dragnet Nation, investigative journalist Julia Angwin documents the surveillance regime under which we live and its alarming day-to-day effects, aiming to ground abstract debates about privacy by explaining concretely what’s at stake. After a recent New America event, I posed five questions to Angwin about her book. Her edited responses are below.
1. The commercial dragnet is partly a result of the economic arrangement that underpins “free” online services: we (largely unwittingly) give companies free reign over our personal data in exchange for their products. Will recovering control over our personal information require a new economic model for services like Facebook and Google?
There have historically been advertising-supported free services that did not rely on surveilling their customers. Think of radio stations or free local newspapers. So, in my opinion, it’s not a given that advertising must equal surveillance.
Of course, advertisers would prefer to know as much as possible about their customers, and companies like Google and Facebook have unprecedentedly powerful tools at their disposal to deliver information to advertisers. I think the question for us as a society is: Where do we draw the line? Do we stick with the status quo, which is unlimited commercial surveillance for nearly any purpose, as long as users ‘consent’ to it in the fine print? Or do we decide that there are some types of surveillance that are too intrusive for their fairly frivolous purpose?
2. You describe your attempt to evade the dragnet as an act of resistance, and note that if enough people join you in refusing indiscriminate surveillance, we might prompt a conversation that ends it – just like sit-ins of the 1960s eventually unraveled segregation. Unlike sit-ins, though, resisting surveillance requires money and skill; it is an expensive form of protest. Isn’t it unrealistic to expect the masses can fight surveillance through resistance?
Resistance to privacy invasions doesn’t always have to be difficult and expensive. Young people who use Snapchat because they want to be able to delete their text messages are protesting without enduring much suffering. People who have quit Facebook as a result of its constantly changing privacy settings are protesting. People who quit Google search and adopt DuckDuckGo because they want a service that doesn’t store logs aren’t suffering that much.
Not everyone will attempt some of the more annoying stuff that I did – things like opting out of the body scanners at the airport, using complicated encryption software and carrying my own MyFi so I don’t have to rely on untrusted Wi-Fi connections. But a surprising number of people write to me every day to say they are attempting to use some of those tactics as well.
Of course, individual actions won’t accomplish everything. But in a democracy, we can hope that individuals who are making privacy-aware choices in their personal life might also make privacy-aware choices in the voting booth.
3. What’s at stake if privacy becomes a commodity rather than a basic right?
I worry that privacy is already becoming a luxury good. Last year, I spent more than $2,000 on privacy protection – including an encrypted cloud service, a burner phone and encryption software. It seems unfair for people to only be able to achieve a measure of privacy with that kind of expense.
I compare it to automobile safety. Cars are dangerous and yet we drive them every day. The reason we feel comfortable driving is that we know that vehicles must meet certain minimum safety standards. And those of us who can afford it can buy additional safety by buying a more expensive car.
I think we need similar assurances about the use of our personal data. If we have a baseline level of privacy that everyone is entitled to, it wouldn’t seem as unfair for people to buy their way into more privacy as a luxury good.
4. Is it enough to demand that companies be transparent about how they use and share our data?
Transparency would be a good start. Right now, we are one of the only Western nations that lacks a baseline privacy law requiring commercial data handlers to let individuals see the data held about them, correct the data and in some cases, remove the data.
When I sought my data from more than 200 data brokers, I was outraged that many of them wouldn’t share my files with me. But even when I got my files from about a dozen of them, I was not reassured. I wanted to know how the information was going to be used, and to be notified if it was used against me in some way.
A good model for data usage could be the Fair Credit Reporting Act – which requires companies to disclose when they have used credit data to deny you employment or a loan, and to allow you to dispute the data. At a minimum, it seems to me that individuals should have the right to see and dispute other types of data – such as social media posts – that might be used against them in important financial decisions.
5. You conclude that what we ultimately need to protect ourselves from the harms of surveillance are not tools but laws. You also note, though, that the privacy laws we do have on the books are pretty easy to circumvent. What might effective laws look like?
I often turn to environmental law for comparisons to what privacy law might look like in the future. The reason is that privacy and pollution are similar issues: they both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource. And both suffer from the fact that it is often difficult to attribute specific harm to a specific piece of data or a specific pollutant.
To solve the pollution problem, we didn’t shut down factories. We forced the polluters to be more transparent to limit their emissions. We also started recycling and driving electric cars. I believe – and hope – that we can solve the privacy problem with a similar mix of individual and collective action.
As a policy analyst for the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, Lina Khan researches the concentration of power in America’s political economy. She reports on agricultural, industrial, and financial markets, and the laws that shape them. This article was originally published in The Weekly Wonk, New America’s digital magazine.
*Image of “touchscreen“ via Shutterstock
