How to make mon­ey off the back of the lit­tle guy

“Oil of the 21^st cen­tu­ry” is a term we often hear to describe data. With every click, com­pa­nies are suck­ing peo­ple dry of their data, often by using the most inno­v­a­tive and refined tech­niques. The vol­ume of data col­lect­ed keeps increas­ing and, while com­pa­nies keep on get­ting rich­er, the aver­age cit­i­zen is get­ting poor­er – and more trans­par­ent. What’s going on here?

In her Duet Inter­view with the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed and cel­e­brat­ed cabaret artist Djan­go Asül, Dr Cal­daro­la, author of Big Data and Law, dis­cuss­es the cur­rent devel­op­ments of data as big business.

It’s open sea­son on col­lect­ing data among the big com­pa­nies. In 2018 alone the glob­al data vol­ume was esti­mat­ed to be about 33 Zettabytes while cur­rent trends lead ana­lysts to pre­dict an increase of up to 175 Zettabytes. What are large cor­po­ra­tions doing with the data of peo­ple, where is it end­ing up, who’s mak­ing mon­ey out of this? Has data become the lat­est and cheap­est raw mate­r­i­al for com­pa­nies to use or are peo­ple sim­ply being exploited?

Djan­go Asül: Com­pa­nies are prob­a­bly not col­lec­tors in the true sense of the word, mean­ing they are sure­ly not going to proud­ly present their col­lec­tion. It seems obvi­ous that mon­ey is meant to be earned by col­lect­ing data, either by tech enter­pris­es offer­ing adver­tis­ing plat­forms or by pro­duc­ing cor­po­ra­tions want­i­ng to sell their data sets.

Exploita­tion is per­haps a lit­tle bit too strong a term since no one is being forced to give away their data. This type of raw mate­r­i­al is, how­ev­er, inex­pen­sive and easy to store. If we reach the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of this sit­u­a­tion from the point of view of mak­ing some cash, there is real­ly only one pos­si­ble out­come: There tru­ly are a lot of peo­ple out there who are total­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to adver­tis­ing. If that were not the case, all these tech giants would not be spend­ing tons of mon­ey on adver­tis­ing. In the end, since this col­lect­ing mania is not going to stop, and peo­ple don’t seem to be avoid­ing it or going offline, we seem to have a lot of sat­is­fied play­ers in this game.

Large cor­po­ra­tions draw us in by tempt­ing us with dis­counts or sup­pos­ed­ly “free” ser­vices, such as, for exam­ple, mes­sen­ger or tele­phone ser­vices, dig­i­tal stor­age space and so on. Up until now, one of life’s lessons has always been that you can’t get some­thing for noth­ing. Has some­thing changed?

There have always been polls to gar­ner infor­ma­tion about poten­tial or cur­rent cus­tomers, which, not infre­quent­ly, were accom­pa­nied by real or sup­posed advan­tages or gifts. Peo­ple are always going to find the idea of some­thing free or a prod­uct accom­pa­nied by a bonus or reward appeal­ing. The big dif­fer­ence is that now con­tact has been estab­lished which is both direct and per­ma­nent, owing to mobile phones. It’s like always leav­ing your door open and any sales­man can look inside. Dig­i­tal­iza­tion has giv­en a new dimen­sion and depth to this type of activ­i­ty. But here too we have to say that peo­ple will­ing­ly par­tic­i­pate in these sorts of things. No one can pre­tend to be a vic­tim here.

Com­pa­nies, which basi­cal­ly suck the data off peo­ple, always have a lot of tricks up their sleeve or, more to the point, sup­posed user-advan­tages which they delib­er­ate­ly put in place. Exam­ples for this type of strat­e­gy include using facial recog­ni­tion as a “key” to unlock­ing and dri­ving cars, talk­ing house­hold appli­ances which learn and improve on their own, vir­tu­al voice assis­tants, smart watch­es and so on. Will we soon be born with two iden­ti­ties- a human one and a dig­i­tal one? Or will we be need­ing a dig­i­tal clone in the near future?

No, for the moment, the dig­i­tal ver­sion of our­selves is more than enough. After all, the ana­logue per­son is not near­ly as reli­able and pre­dictable as his or her dig­i­tal twin. If you think how many peo­ple are already over­whelmed by their day-to-day lives, then they would prob­a­bly be hap­py to out­source the val­i­da­tion of their exis­tence to their dig­i­tal twin.

This is one way to enjoy the fin­er things of life. After that, it is irrel­e­vant whether the dig­i­tal twin can unlock a self-dri­ving vehi­cle or how often this is done. The only impor­tant thing is that a car was purchased.The man­u­fac­tur­er does not real­ly ask for more from the client.

My opin­ion is:

 

“Who­ev­er pays too much atten­tion to the dig­i­tal world and not enough to the real one, deserves what s/he gets!”

Djan­go Asül

Do you think peo­ple know or are in a posi­tion to mea­sure what they actu­al­ly pay for when they use apps? Or expressed dif­fer­ent­ly, are peo­ple respon­si­ble enough to see through the aims of these big com­pa­nies? Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Cen­tu­ry, “For every dol­lar and minute we invest in improv­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, it would be wise to invest a dol­lar and a minute in advanc­ing human consciousness.”

Mr. Harar­i’s the­o­ry would be cor­rect, if peo­ple want­ed to lead a life which they had deter­mined them­selves. But it seems like many find it unin­ter­est­ing or too demand­ing to con­trol the air space of their own lives or even to keep hold of it. They pre­fer being per­ma­nent­ly enter­tained or dis­tract­ed. It would come as a real shock if peo­ple were con­front­ed with their con­scious selves. The num­ber of glob­al cit­i­zens who tend to think like Mr. Harari or cor­re­spond to his ide­al human is prob­a­bly a lot small­er than we would like.

Every user is becom­ing more and more vis­i­ble, with every app that a s/he down­loads, all the while mak­ing the one con­trol­ling the data rich­er. Why are there so many large com­pa­nies who own a lot of data, pay so lit­tle in tax­es and with so lit­tle mate­r­i­al cap­i­tal become wealthy? Where is this lead­ing and where does it end?

With regard to your obser­va­tion, the philoso­phies of inter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies come into direct con­flict with nation­al fis­cal poli­cies. All these cor­po­ra­tions can cer­tain­ly count on gov­ern­ments focus­ing on what is in it for the rel­e­vant coun­try. If, for exam­ple, the big tech com­pa­nies have their head­quar­ters in the U.S., then the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment is real­ly not going to care if these com­pa­nies have to pay a lot of tax­es in Europe or Asia. And even in Europe it’s hard­ly a dif­fi­cult mat­ter to play off one coun­try against anoth­er. In Ire­land, tax­es are low­er while the Nether­lands offers inter­est­ing IP-box­es. This means that Euro­pean head­quar­ters tend to be locat­ed in Dublin while first push­ing their rev­enues through to Ams­ter­dam. The com­pa­nies are not to blame. They are mere­ly tak­ing advan­tage of the exist­ing rules. How­ev­er, the Euro­pean Union has, in this regard, clear­ly demon­strat­ed that it is any­thing but a union. Where all this leads to is quite clear: The Big Com­pa­nies are hard­ly being taxed at all, and the gov­ern­ments are act­ing as if noth­ing could be done to avoid this situation.

Do you think bor­der­less trans­fer­ring of data is accept­able- espe­cial­ly if we keep in mind that coun­tries han­dle data dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on their cul­ture, ethics and gov­ern­ment forms? How long will this continue?

If I freely give my data to a glob­al con­cern, then I real­ly can’t be sur­prised if the very same data is being used at an inter­na­tion­al lev­el. I would rather ask, at the risk of sound­ing naive, what is being achieved. The South Kore­an branch of a Ger­man or Amer­i­can car man­u­fac­tur­er can have a lot of infor­ma­tion on me, if you look it at that way, so long as they have enough room on their serv­er or in the cloud. And how long this con­tin­ues is a rel­a­tive mat­ter. This answer is as long as the con­sumers are will­ing to put up with this sit­u­a­tion. A big com­pa­ny often behaves just like an indi­vid­ual per­son: We like to push things to the lim­it until we are being sanc­tioned in some way or the shit has hit the fan and we are stuck deal­ing with the shit storm.

Yuval Noah Harari writes in his 21 Lessons for the 21^st Cen­tu­ry that “Big data algo­rithms could cre­ate dig­i­tal dic­ta­tor­ships in which all pow­er is con­cen­trat­ed in the hands of a tiny elite, while most peo­ple suf­fer not from exploita­tion but from some­thing far worse – irrel­e­vance. Has that already come to pass or will it happen?

The indi­vid­ual per­son has most cer­tain­ly become irrel­e­vant because, as far as these big com­pa­nies are con­cerned, they don’t care about the well-being of a sin­gle per­son, but rather about their busi­ness mod­el. Fur­ther­more, as long as glob­al pol­i­tics can­not reach a con­sen­sus con­cern­ing these mat­ters, then noth­ing is going to change. Tech com­pa­nies are not exact­ly set up to be demo­c­ra­t­ic orga­ni­za­tions. Once a CEO has made a cer­tain deci­sion, its reper­cus­sions can resound through­out the world in a mat­ter of min­utes. Mean­while, in a democ­ra­cy, once a res­o­lu­tion has been made, it is often a slow and painful process get­ting to the final out­come. In this regard, big com­pa­nies have a real advan­tage over demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ments, and they will cer­tain­ly not hes­i­tate to make use of it. If the boss of Twit­ter decides to shut down the Twit­ter account of the U.S. pres­i­dent, then he just does it. That action was prob­a­bly not a sin­gle or even a final demon­stra­tion of pow­er, but real­ly just rep­re­sents the beginning.

Mr Asül, thank you so much for shar­ing your opin­ion, your thoughts and your view on our present and future dig­i­tal world.

Thank you, Dr Cal­daro­la, and I look for­ward to read­ing your upcom­ing inter­views with rec­og­nized experts, delv­ing even deep­er into this fas­ci­nat­ing topic.