How to make mon­ey off the back of the lit­tle guy

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Djan­go Asül – Pho­to: Dirk Beichert

“Oil of the 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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.

About me and my guest

Dr Maria Cristina Caldarola

Dr Maria Cristina Caldarola, LL.M., MBA is the host of “Duet Interviews”, co-founder and CEO of CU³IC UG, a consultancy specialising in systematic approaches to innovation, such as algorithmic IP data analysis and cross-industry search for innovation solutions.

Cristina is a well-regarded legal expert in licensing, patents, trademarks, domains, software, data protection, cloud, big data, digital eco-systems and industry 4.0.

A TRIUM MBA, Cristina is also a frequent keynote speaker, a lecturer at St. Gallen, and the co-author of the recently published Big Data and Law now available in English, German and Mandarin editions.

Django Asül

Django Asül, whose real name is Uğur Bağışlayıcı, is a well-known Bavarian comedian of Turkish descent, and hails from Lower Bavaria. After obtaining his German Abitur, he completed an apprenticeship as a bank clerk. As if that wasn't enough, Asül also trained to be a tennis instructor. In 1997 the Bavarian artist put on his first stage show, entitled “haemocracy”. He has appeared many times in comedy shows on German television as well as in crime series like “Tatort” and others. In 2007 Django Asül delivered the tongue-in-cheek post-Carnival speech at the annual beer festival at the Nockherberg in Munich, consisting of biting commentaries on politics in cleverly worded ironic statements or heavy sideswipes aimed at politicians from all parties attending the ceremony.Since 2008 the colourful artist has also been entertaining the political elite of Bavaria and never shies from taking the mickey out them every year with satirical performances at the public Royal Brewery in Munich, the famous Hofbräuhaus at the traditional beer keg tapping ceremony. Django Asül also has his own comedy show on television “Asül for all” (a play on words:Asül meaning “asylum for all”) and since 2011 he has been delivering a yearly satirical annual review called “Rückspiegel” (Another play on words since the word also means rear view mirror) – both aired on Bavarian Television channel, with about 800 000 to 1 million viewers nationwide. Since autumn 2019 the multi-talent is now performing his seventh solo life-show “Open visor”. The act can be characterized as being a clever and topical political cabaret show with sharp political commentary and a lot of punch lines to soften the blow and deliver sophisticated entertainment.

Dr Maria Cristina Caldarola

Dr Maria Cristina Caldarola, LL.M., MBA is the host of “Duet Interviews”, co-founder and CEO of CU³IC UG, a consultancy specialising in systematic approaches to innovation, such as algorithmic IP data analysis and cross-industry search for innovation solutions.

Cristina is a well-regarded legal expert in licensing, patents, trademarks, domains, software, data protection, cloud, big data, digital eco-systems and industry 4.0.

A TRIUM MBA, Cristina is also a frequent keynote speaker, a lecturer at St. Gallen, and the co-author of the recently published Big Data and Law now available in English, German and Mandarin editions.

FOL­LOW ME