It is old news that all the tech we now live with is constantly gathering data about us. It is important, however, not to become complacent about this or to assume the situation cannot or is not getting worse. Pretty much every piece of digital technology that we interact with likely is gathering some personal information about you which is used to target advertising and to sell to third parties. Regulations in most countries are inadequate and fail to keep up with technological changes.
One of the latest venues to soak up information about you may be surprising – your car. Cars are increasingly computerized, and they typically collect driving behavior data – how fast your drive, how hard you break, and how tight you make turns. But also, some vehicles have cameras facing the driver which means they can detect your behavior visually. Sometimes this is sold as a safety feature, to tell if you are too sleepy or inebriated to drive. Sometimes this is part of a system to get your insurance company to reduce your rates if you think you are a safe driver. But often it is done without disclosure. Recent GM was found guilty of collecting and selling such data without the permission of the user, and was banned for doing so for five years. But many other car manufacturers also do this.
All they really have to do is bury some disclosure deep in the user agreement, which functionally nobody reads, and they are covered. You may have the ability to opt-out of such data selling. Of course, putting the burden on the end user to find and read any such disclosures and then go through the steps necessary to opt out of data selling is a huge problem. In fact insurance companies will buy data from car companies and then use that data to increase your insurance premiums, without you opting into any of it.
The basic fact is that collecting data from users, packaging that data and then selling it to third parties is a huge industry. It is estimated that globally this is a $240 billion industry. When that kind of money is on the line, companies are going to do everything they can to capitalize on it, while avoiding legal issues by either flying under the radar or hiding behind legal fig leaves (like the buried consumer disclosures). They will also use that money to lobby the government to let them continue to do so, or even to mandate certain things that will help this industry. For example, some car monitoring technology is sold as a safety feature, and it can legitimately be used for this purpose. Others are convenience features, like GPS. But once all the sensors and cameras are in place, they will soak up all the data they can – because that data is worth billions.
User data is collected from computers, pretty much every time you visit a website. It is collected from apps on your phone. And now it is collected from you car as well. If the “internet of things” becomes a reality, then every appliance could be collecting data on you.
All this data can now be paired with AI tools to sift through it, find patterns, and make inferences. They can not only infer your buying habits, but also your political affiliation. They can then use this to target political content to you. They will know which buttons to push and with push them expertly to affect your political beliefs and behaviors. Everyone, of course, likes to think we are resistant to such manipulation, but that is a conceit. In any case, in the aggregate people can very predictably be manipulated.
And of course, imagine the power of this data combined with AI in the hands of a totalitarian government. It is an authoritarian’s dream. But don’t think this kind of abuse is limited to blatantly authoritarian governments – authoritarianism is a continuum, and there are likely few governments free of any such tendencies. Fear of bad actors and the promise of safety is effectively used to get us to give away tiny portions of freedom, which accumulates over time.
The only solution is comprehensive regulation – a common theme I keep raising when it comes to modern technology. This is because technology is advancing quickly, and corporations, by default, have all the control. Free market forces are great for what they do, but in order to be effective the end consumer must have adequate information. This is increasingly difficult because as technology advances it is increasingly difficult for the average user to have enough expertise to navigate all the risks and perils. All the various technologies and applications are also overwhelming in the aggregate – you can spend your entire work day just managing your own security, fending off spam and other intrusive advertising, and trying to understand the technology you deal with regularly. All of this burden should not be on the consumer.
This is partly why we have elected representatives. There is some common-sense regulations that should be universal. People should not have the burden to opt out, it should be required that they actively opt in if they want any data collected or sold or to be sent any advertising. If you find you have been somehow opted in to anything like this, it should be trivially easy to opt out. It is OK to collect depersonalized aggregate data for research, but it is not OK to collect personalized data that can be tied to a specific person. The collection and use of any such data needs to be tightly regulated (like it is in medicine), with total transparency and heavy penalties for violators. It is not enough to have a disclosure buried in a user agreement.
In the US we are simultaneously in a situation of high political disfunction and rapid technological advance requiring thoughtful regulation. This is a bad combination. I know this is just another burden placed on the end user (all of us), but I don’t see another option. We need to educate ourselves on current technology and then advocate for common sense regulations. Write your representative – this actually does help. But long term we need to fix our broken political system so that our representative actually represent our interests.
