Meet the people fighting surveillance capitalism
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hello, my name is Fiona and today I'm here to talk to you about some of the people and the movements who are protecting all of our privacy from being invaded for power and for profit. But why is it that I'm talking about this?
00:27
Well, in the earlier part of my career I worked in audience segmentation for ad targeting. We looked at the clickstream of all the information we knew about the customers visiting our site and we tried to make
00:42
some assumptions about maybe why they were visiting. We used this to target ads at them a little bit better and therefore make more money. Now at the time this seemed perfectly harmless to me. However, since then the amount of data being collected about all of us everywhere we go on the internet... oh
01:18
it's okay. Should I start over or is it... people say it's fine. Okay cool.
01:25
So I worked in audience segmentation for ads, seemed harmless, but now we have so much more data being collected about us from all of our interactions across the internet. And this is also now being used for new things, not just
01:40
to target products at us, maybe ones we've already purchased, but also to try and shift our perception of the world and our actions and for political marketing. I had not considered how the exact same technological approach that I was applying way back then could now be used for this kind of
02:02
purpose. To shift public perception to meet the needs of a few people with power. I'm going to show you some examples of what I mean. So this is an ad that was shown on Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 UK-EU membership
02:20
referendum. This ad seems to imply that Turkey will be joining the EU and that this would somehow mean the entire population of Turkey would decide to pick up and shift to the UK. The only thing I find really ridiculous is this question here, which is not really a question, it's
02:41
clearly a statement, because this content was targeted only at people for whom that answer is very clear. The reason we see this ad right now is because the UK parliament forced Facebook to hand it over, along with many others. Now obviously Turkey did not join the EU, this wasn't really
03:05
on the table. But what the point is, is when this is only shown to people for whom it won't be questioned, we can't have those kinds of conversations as a society. And since no one's fact checking and pointing it out, this manipulative message simply continues to spread.
03:25
This really leads to us living in our own bubbles, without a shared concept of reality. Another example, this time from the Trump campaign, specifically the smear campaign against Hillary Clinton, that was run by Cambridge Analytica. We'll talk a bit more about them
03:43
later. Now, these ads can be even more powerful when they're not shown in the typical parts of the screen we expect to see ads, like on the sidebar or something, but they show in our news feed, with some small badge saying sponsored. And they can be even more powerful
04:03
when they are what's called unpublished posts or dark posts. These ones don't even show up in the news feed of the person who's posting in their timeline, and is not shown to anyone who follows the poster. These posts are just shared with the target group.
04:24
And this is not even a very sophisticated piece of this information. It's much more exciting what can now happen with deepfakes technology. I will skip this. In her book coining the term, Shoshana Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as a new
04:44
economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales. Now, she provides eight definitions of this term, and the second one
05:02
also mentions behavior modification, which I think is worth pointing out. We could also see this as kind of like a cycle, where we have tracking being done by data miners and others, recording all of what we are doing online, and then we have profiling occurring, where we try to make guesses about
05:24
different segments of our audience and perhaps what kind of messaging they'll be susceptible to. Next, content is generated specifically to target those segment groups and shown to them, with the goal of persuading them, either in their thought processes or their actions.
05:42
Whether this targeting actually works is just another thing to track and to learn from in this vicious cycle. To make things worse, this is rather intransparent to all the people who are being monitored in this way, as almost no one is giving informed consent for this. I don't consider scrolling through the
06:04
terms and conditions that are too long and no one reads and clicking accept as informed consent. Any participation by users in any part of this cycle benefits the platforms that integrate it. They benefit because they have more opportunities to track, more opportunities
06:23
to show ads, and the ability to then show more targeted ads in the future. It's also pretty tricky for users to opt out of this, because participation in these platforms is so connected to our ability to connect to each other and opportunities we might have.
06:43
It's like, have you ever tried to get your family or friendship group to leave WhatsApp? It's not always easy. Some people are nodding. Now, in this talk I will use Facebook quite a lot as an example, but they are definitely not the only product that follows this. Really, all of Meta's offerings
07:04
fall into this bucket, as well as some of Google's offerings, and there's plenty of others. Pretty much any company where advertising revenue is their major form of income. Okay, so I could spend the rest of this time just talking about the problem space,
07:21
but I think that's been done, and I also think it just might be a bit kind of a downer. So, since that's not very motivating, instead what I'd like to do is to talk to you about some of the people who already have initiatives tackling this. I've been really lucky to have met some of these people
07:44
over the years, and I think by learning about what progress is already being made, it can maybe give us hope and inspire us to act. So then, let's start with the introductions. The first people I would like you to
08:00
meet are crypto party hosts. Now, I'm not talking about crypto bros, but more cypher punks. Has anyone here been to a crypto party, if you feel like sharing? Wow, someone's right up there immediately, hand up. Not too many, okay. Does anyone know the term crypto party? They could define it.
08:21
Probably the guy who's been to one. Okay, a few more people. So, a crypto party, for those who aren't yet familiar, is an event where volunteers run workshops to teach anyone who's interested about using privacy-preserving tools. This is sort of the main way, I guess, that we can tackle that first part of
08:45
the cycle, the tracking part. Shajana, the author of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, describes the importance of privacy in society, stating that we can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. The name crypto
09:07
party is attributed to Asher Volf, who popularised the term in Melbourne, Australia, at a particularly important moment in the history there. This was when the Australian government had recently instituted a new regulation
09:22
where all internet service providers needed to store metadata about every user's internet and phone usage, and store this data for two years to be accessed by government departments. So, she describes a crypto party as a bunch of friends
09:42
with computers and a slab of beer, plus the desire to use the most basic crypto tools. Now, I will have to describe one of the terms there, a slab of beer. This is an Australian term. It refers to this box, which would contain 24 beers, like
10:00
this gentleman is showcasing. But I think the core of her message, really, is that we as people who have tech literacy, this sort of digital know-how, can lend that privilege to others who are interested or in need of more protection online than what they would get by default.
10:22
I think this is a super beautiful idea, and I'm not alone, because within only four months there had been 30 crypto parties run worldwide. And now this is really a global movement, with crypto parties being run across at least 59 countries as well as remotely. And I think it's no surprise that this
10:44
grew into such a huge global movement, as it was just the next year that the Snowden revelations were revealed. This is some examples of some of the tools that are taught at crypto parties. It's definitely not exhaustive, and at the top there you can see their website
11:02
where you would find tutorials to help you get set up or use any of these tools. They also have learning materials you can use to teach others about them. They have a full guide about how to market, plan, and host your own crypto party, or if that feels like too much work,
11:21
they also have a list of locations so you can find one running near you and maybe go as an attendee or as a volunteer. When I was volunteering at crypto parties, I found a lot of the participants who I met were journalists. I think they're a great example of a group who would really benefit from this,
11:41
not just to protect themselves, but also to protect their sources. When Edward Snowden first contacted journalist Glenn Greenwald, he first had to encourage Glenn to familiarize himself a bit more with privacy-preserving communication tools before he could reveal what he knew.
12:02
Glenn talks about this in depth in his book, No Place to Hide. Speaking of whistleblowers, they are the next group of people who I would like to talk about, and I would like to highlight some of what they brought to light about the inner workings and the capabilities of the surveillance capitalism machine.
12:23
To start with, I'd like to talk about Cambridge Analytica. For those who are maybe fortunate enough not already to be aware, Cambridge Analytica were an agency specializing in data mining, audience segmentation, and custom content creation for the purposes of manipulating key voters.
12:44
Their differentiator was that they used Facebook data from 50 million profiles to do an audience segmentation based on personality traits. This was also their undoing, as none of that data was collected
13:03
with the consent or being informed of any of those users. It was also against Facebook's terms. They were not a household name, however, until the Guardian and the Observer came forward with information from a
13:23
group of whistleblowers was Brittany Kaiser, who leaked documents including this marketing slide where Cambridge Analytica boast about the impact they have had on elections globally. I already showed you another example of an excerpt from her documents that she leaked. That was the smear campaign against Hillary Clinton
13:43
from earlier. Another whistleblower who was previously working for Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, describes how that personality-based audience segmentation was then used. He states that whatever it is that we think
14:01
the target profile will be receptive to, we will create content on the internet for them to find. And then they'll see it and they'll click that and then they'll go down the rabbit hole until they start to think something differently. He describes what they were offering as a psychological warfare tool.
14:22
And when he blew the whistle, he also revealed the names of the people who were using and funding that tool. Here are some of the outcomes, I guess the easier to measure ones, of those revelations. Though these first set of figures might seem rather impressive,
14:41
unfortunately they did not sustain. And though Cambridge Analytica did have to close, some people previously working there went on to work at kind of similar firms. There was, however, some sustained action from this. Firstly, there was the impact on Facebook's reputation. Secondly, the general public came to know a
15:05
little bit more about what kind of political manipulation is occurring. And thirdly, there were impacts on regulation. I'd like to introduce a couple more whistleblowers, this time from Facebook.
15:21
The first is Sophie Jung, who revealed that in her time at Facebook, she says, I found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry. Sophie worked as a data scientist, specifically in the fake engagements team.
15:43
And what she uncovered were large groups of inauthentic accounts being used to create likes and generate positive engagement with some political parties' posts. She also found big sets of inauthentic
16:00
accounts being used to terrorize the opposition and the media with very hateful commenting. But what disappointed her was that when she went to her management with this, she found that all of these policy violations were being prioritized more in the direction of what impact
16:21
they might have on Facebook's image than what impact they might have on the world. This leads to countries that are maybe less well represented in the Western media also being less well moderated on Facebook. Another ex-Facebook employee who had previously worked
16:42
at a lot of other social media companies in the past, Francis Haugen, also points out that Facebook's algorithm gives the most reach to the most extreme and divisive ideas and that this process is destabilizing some of the most fragile places in the world, like
17:01
Ethiopia or what happened in Myanmar. She revealed quite a few things about how these choices in terms of how the algorithm is optimized have impacted the world. She shared that Facebook knows that they have a negative impact on the mental health, especially of young
17:20
users, that the speed at which misinformation spreads has increased, and also that some of these choices lead to real-world violence leading to injury and death. But what both these Facebook whistleblowers have in common in their messaging is that they both say that Facebook is a company with many very well-meaning
17:41
people working there, but that in the end, the decisions made prioritize Facebook's own image over the real-world harm they can create. All four of these whistleblowers have given testimony to the UK Parliament and some also to the US Congress and to
18:05
the European Parliament. Though all of these hearings have taken place in the global north, the impact on regulation has been global. When it was released that Cambridge Analytica had worked on elections in Nigeria and Kenya, both countries instituted
18:23
new data protection laws which read very similar to the GDPR. Hopefully, we will see more regulation in this space to tackle exactly the things that these whistleblowers are pointing out. But if we don't, we can look to this next group of
18:40
people who I want to introduce, who can maybe give us some tips on how to make that happen. Net neutrality campaigners. Now, this is a really broad term, but specifically, I would like to introduce some of the people who campaigned against Free Basics by Facebook. It's a long shot, but has anyone heard of or knows of Free Basics by Facebook?
19:04
Awesome. There are some people. Great. Cool. For those who aren't yet familiar, this is a project where Facebook partners with mobile service providers, specifically in parts of mobile penetration. And there, they're able to offer Facebook
19:21
and other Facebook-approved apps for free to the users. Now, the mobile service provider picks up those costs and hopefully then gets more users. And in the meantime, Facebook provide this app. But what is it like for the user? So the user then has a small section of the internet
19:44
available to them, which is entirely curated by and observable to Facebook. And if they would like to cross-check any of what they read in this small section of the internet, they would be needing to pay for that. And
20:01
as we heard at the beginning, this is communities with low internet penetration, so probably people who will not pay for that. So what we've got now is a clear net neutrality violation and also a great recipe for misinformation. Francis Haugen, who we met earlier, said in an interview that some folks within Facebook were joking that you
20:23
could probably predict the next region, which was going to have increased instability, just by looking at where Facebook had entered a new market a couple of years earlier. It's projects like this that don't help this
20:41
startling issue that for many parts of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. Now, I found it shockingly difficult to find a list of which countries currently have Free Basics active. You would think that would be a simple question somewhere on Meta's website, but no, I could not find it anywhere. I found a count
21:03
that said it was 30-plus countries or something, but in the end, I just used a proxy server, and I can confirm that all 12 of these countries, as of May this year, did have Free Basics actively available. But not every place that Facebook tried to get Free Basics
21:21
started did it succeed. I would like now to talk about what happened in India. So when Facebook first brought Free Basics to India, they were displaying this survey on the left to their users at the top of the news feed, and this survey gives the users an option to
21:43
either express their support for Free Basics now or later. One colleague of mine admitted he was actually tricked by this deceptive design and had clicked yes. This forwarded him on to a pre-filled form where he
22:01
could sign up as someone who his local government authority would be informed is in support of Free Basics. When he learned more about what this actually is, he wanted to revoke that, but he could not find a way. Instead, this fueled him in the fight, and he joined the
22:22
Free Software Movement of India, who created a counter survey, which was aimed at informing the public about net neutrality and then providing them the option to make an informed choice. It was really India's strong and huge tech community that helped to decipher this, what
22:42
was being offered to the people, to educate the general public, and make net neutrality a dinner time conversation in households. Phenomenal. They did this by taking it to the streets, by being in contact with journalists and getting it in the newspaper. They were also having a big online presence about this. In the
23:03
end, the Telecom Registry Authority of India did issue the Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulation that prohibited what Facebook was doing with Free Basics and other similar net neutrality violations. Chile also have a similar regulation, but in so many
23:22
parts of the world, this regulation does not exist, and Facebook's Free Basics was able to continue to spread after this. But in the recent year or two, Facebook has started to offer something new. It's called Discover, and it seems to me like it could be a reaction to this,
23:44
because with Discover, users can access the entire internet. This is only being trialed in a couple of places so far, but the way it works is there is a daily data cap, but they can access any website. However, to make this more possible for the mobile service providers,
24:03
Facebook use a proxy, which all traffic is routed through, and this proxy takes out all of the very data-intensive activities like video, audio, this kind of stuff. So a user would have to have quite a lot of trust in Facebook, who basically makes the requests on their behalf to the rest of
24:22
the internet. This is more trust than we need to have in an ISP or a VPN provider. More trust than I think I would have, but I am privileged to have the option to not choose it. For some of these campaigners, getting this regulation passed and blocking Free Basics was not
24:41
enough. They were now so aware of communities who were disconnected. Instead, what they then did was found rural communities with low internet penetration and set up communal Wi-Fi hotspots with built-in privacy tools. They used the Debian FreedomBox open source software,
25:02
and not just that, they also provided training to these new users to help them with their transition online. Now it's one thing to have regulation, but it's an entirely different thing to have it actually be adhered to and enforced. And that's where this next group come in, who
25:22
I'm calling Data Regulation Enablers. These are the folks who are uncovering regulatory breaches and holding companies accountable for that, because regulation without it actually being enforced isn't useful. This is Carol
25:41
Cadwalder. She's an investigative journalist who was looking into the ads being placed by the pro-leave campaign, for instance, like the one I showed at the very beginning. She found it was extremely difficult to do her investigative work due to the intransparency of the whole setup. But she was able to uncover political
26:03
overspending on this campaign. In her amazing TED talk, which I cannot recommend highly enough, she mentions that only you see your newsfeed, and then it vanishes. So it's impossible to research. We have no idea who saw what ads, or what was used to target
26:22
those people, or even who placed the ads, and therefore who paid for them, right? She was also the person who found Christopher Wiley, who we met earlier, and was one of the people who encouraged him to blow the whistle on Cambridge Analytica. But what she's
26:42
uncovering here is a huge unmet need for transparency. This same unmet need is seen by the Who Targets Me browser plugin authors, who have created this neat plugin where in the lead up to an election, you can install it and see which political parties are actually targeting you. And this is not my data,
27:04
this is just the one that they show, but you could get some idea about maybe who's interested in trying to sway your opinion. When Max Schrems saw that plugin, he saw an opportunity, an opportunity to get the data that he needs
27:22
in order to enforce the prohibition of micro-targeting based on political opinions, which is particularly protected under Article 9 of the GDPR, to make future elections in Europe more democratic and fair. Now he went out in search of people who had used this plugin in the lead up to the latest elections in Germany.
27:45
And he found people, he found people willing to donate their data to him, and now he's left with the very fun job of going through all that data to find the GDPR breaches so that he could, if he finds them, raise legal case. For anyone who doesn't
28:03
know Max, he's also super cool, he's a data protections activist and a lawyer with a rather expensive hobby of trying to keep companies honest in terms of EU data regulations. And he's been doing this for about 10 years with actually quite a lot of success,
28:23
but it's good that he started super young because this is taking a really long time, and he expects it to take a longer time. But in the meantime, actually, he has co-founded a data privacy not-for-profit, sorry, who are called NOYOB, which is standing for None of Your Business.
28:43
And with NOYOB, he's able to scale and fund this work. In case it's been a while since you last read the GDPR, maybe your memory is a little fuzzy, this is Article 9, the one that NOYOB are looking to enforce. It states that the processing of personal data revealing racial, ethnic origin, political opinions,
29:04
religious or philosophical beliefs, amongst other things, shall be prohibited. Has anyone here ever exercised their rights under the GDPR, made like a deletion request to ask to see all their data? Couple of people, very cool, awesome. Has anyone thought about exercising
29:24
their rights under the GDPR, but then like, you know, life, and it's probably hard, and okay, more people, great, okay, so many more people. Yeah, so what's also excellent is that NOYOB have a set of step-by-step guides on their website that explain, in really simple terms, how to go about
29:42
requesting the data a company has about you, getting it corrected, getting it deleted, and more interesting stuff about data processing or automated decision making. They have really quite clear guides, and I think it's exciting what we're able to do with the GDPR, what rights we can exercise as people in Europe.
30:03
But there's no point in having that right unless we exercise it. I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to the next piece of regulation in this space, which is the Digital Services Act. And I'm not just excited about it because of this kind of cool outrun synthwave theme they've got going, but also because of the content.
30:25
What they're looking to do is increase transparency about ad targeting, as well as about recommendations engines, to strengthen profiling laws, and all of this with the goal of reducing the risk of misinformation and manipulation.
30:43
Now, this could come into play as early as the first of Jan 2024, but honestly, they haven't released the draft yet, so let's see. I look forward to reading it when it's there. So who was it who we met today? Well, first off, we met some folks who were sharing their tech literacy
31:02
with others, and including journalists, to teach them how to use privacy-preserving open-source software. Maybe we'll bump into some of those folks at a crypto party near us. Next up, we were introduced to some whistleblowers, and we came to know more about the information that they brought to the world
31:23
about the inner workings of the surveillance capitalism machine. Next up, I introduced you to some campaigners who used their voice in the streets, online, and in the press to make net neutrality a conversation in their community,
31:42
and stopped companies from creating walled gardens of content that only they can control, and calling it the internet. And just now, we met some of the folks who take those regulations and make sure they are actually enforced. And we learned a bit about how users and technologists alike
32:00
can support this movement. But that's enough about all of them. I'm very much looking forward to meeting you. Thanks so much for listening. If you are interested to read more about any of what I was talking about, I have a full list of references here on my website. If it's too quick, I can also provide you with that later.
32:24
And in the words of the guiding principles of the crypto party group, be excellent to each other and do things. Thank you.