Jennifer Zhu Scott
You Are the Product: A Three-Step Plan to Take Back Control of Personal Data
Entrepreneur and investor Jennifer Zhu Scott is a council member of The Future of Blockchain Council at the World Economic Forum and holds a dual fellowship with the APAC Program and the Digital Society Initiative at Chatham House. She is also a consultant to the HBO show “Silicon Valley.”
WE RECOMMEND THE VIDEO: PAANO KUMITA ONLINE | $ 24 AGAD SA PAGTATRADE LANG NG CRYPTO CURRENCIES | PASSIVE INCOME SA BINANCE |
Pwede nyo rin idownload sa playstore join this channel to get access to perks: ...
Let’s state a simple fact. Your traits and intimate personal information, such as your relationships, location histories, sexual orientation, genetic details and your children’s images have become business assets. But they are not yours. They are recorded in digital form and centrally controlled, owned, stored and repurposed for often outsized profit by a handful of corporates. What is the accurate characterization of your function to those companies? We’ve all heard this statement: “If you are not paying for the service, you are not a customer. You are the product.” But that may not be quite right. Shoshana Zuboff, the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” says “Actually, you are not even the products. You are just the raw materials.”
Facebook carefully crafts algorithms to manipulate and exploit our vanity, greed, fear, insecurity, loneliness and dopamine, so billions of users, especially psychologically vulnerable youth or elderly people, will keep supplying raw materials for free. We are paying for the smartphone in our hands and the bandwidth to access the internet. It costs us time and attention and risks our mental wellbeing. We think we own our content, yet tech titans like Facebook, Google and Tencent milk it to target us for a fatter margin.
Obviously, it is easy to point out the problems. I intend to identify and create some solutions. Building on a TED talk I gave last December (see above), here are three ways we can change the power dynamic.
Step 1: Awareness
When we rushed to Facebook and Google in the early days, we were so excited about the capacities of technologies we neglected to think through the consequences. Digital Economy 1.0 is a failure at protecting our privacy and well-being. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal was a rude wake-up call for us all. Public concerns over privacy, political implications and generational psychological damage have been growing ever since. But there are still too many of us relying on monopoly “services.” We need to understand (then help everyone around us to understand) how important it is to support the alternatives, even if they don’t function as well for now. Remember, Google is not indispensable; a search engine is. Google merely has a monopoly.
Step 2: The economic value of our personal data
We need to value our data properly. That doesn’t mean looking at the price on the open market. It means looking at the value created for the most data-savvy companies in the world. The combined revenue of Alphabet, Facebook and Tencent in 2019 was $284 billion. We live in a world of extreme, concentrated ownership of the most valuable asset of our time. We all have a job constantly contributing to these companies in every second of our digital life, but few of us are paid. To regain our digital freedom, it takes every one of us to realize and demand the economic value of our data and stop giving our data away for free.
Tuesday, December 15, 2020