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Opinion
The Guardian view on digital giants: they farm us for the data
Editorial
We are neither the customers nor even the product of companies like Google,
but we turn our lives into the knowledge that they sell
An astonishing project is under way to build a “digital time machine” that
will show us in fine detail the lives of ordinary Venetians across a thousand
years of history. It is made possible by the persistence of the republic’s
bureaucracy, which, when Napoleon extinguished the Republic of Venice in 1797,
left behind 80km of shelving full of records of births, deaths, trades,
building, land ownership, private letters, ambassadors’ reports and even medical
information. All this is now to be digitised, cross-referenced, and analysed,
and all its secrets laid bare to provide a picture in unprecedented richness and
detail of the lives of individuals and the development of society over many
centuries. Obviously, this is wonderful for historians and indeed anybody with
an imagination alive today. One wonders, though, what the Venetians would have
made of it, had they known their lives and letters would be so carefully
anatomised after their deaths.
Far more is known about us now, though, and in real time. The data in the
Venetian archives was unmatched in medieval and even early modern Europe, but it
is only legend and scraps of hearsay compared to the knowledge of us accumulated
by the giants of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, and Amazon – who all in
various ways use the data harvested from their users to make billions of
dollars, from advertising or from direct selling, or from some combination of
both. Their knowledge of our intimate lives doesn’t wait two centuries or more
until we’re dead. They get it live, in real time. Sometimes they know our minds
before we know them ourselves. It’s a situation quite unprecedented in
history.
The European commission may be about to levy the biggest fine in its
history on Google for anti-competitive behaviour – potentially more than €1bn.
This case, five years in the making, is the latest, and perhaps the largest,
battle in the struggle to establish democratic control over the giants of the
digital economy. In the US, the government has been captured by the
corporations, and in China universal surveillance is openly converted to a means
of government control. Only the EU attempts to balance these powers to the
benefit of the ordinary citizen.
The power and ambition of these companies is astonishing – Amazon has just
announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn,
but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp
messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp
offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed tracery of its users’
friendships and social lives. Facebook promised the European commission then
that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the
promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was
in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously
revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would
not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s
enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value to Amazon of Whole
Foods is not so much the 460 shops it owns, or the distribution network, but the
records of which customers have purchased what.
Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of
power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of
change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and
remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses
of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as
presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is
not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of
their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy
advertising from them – and Facebook and Google operate a virtual duopoly in
digital advertising to the detriment of all other media and entertainment
companies.
The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives
to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm aphids for
the honeydew that oozes from them when they feed, so Google farms us for the
data that our digital lives exude. Ants keep predatory insects away from where
their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel
like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.
• This article was amended on 19 June 2017 to remove a reference to Apple
which was not apt.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/18/the-guardian-view-on-digital-giants-they-farm-us-for-the-data
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