Welcome to this book launch of the new book Privacy's Power by Charissa Alice,
who is an associate professor at the Institute for the Ethics of A.I. here at the University of Oxford and a
fellow of Hertford College and a fellow of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Ethics of Weapon Data Architecture.
My name is Rosmus Nelson.
I'm Professor of Political Communication at the University and director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism,
where we explore the future of journalism worldwide.
And I've done a little bit of work on some of the issues around privacy and data that Charissa will take us through today.
My role here is to serve as the chair of the discussion today.
So we all look forward to hearing Charissa talk about her important than interesting
new book on privacy and how it connects with power or the power of states,
the power of private companies and potentially the power of US citizens.
And I will ask a few follow up questions after the presentation,
and then we will have a Q&A opportunity for those of you who've joined the conversation today.
If you could please use the ask a question function on the crowd cast platform,
then I will take questions from there and give Keris an opportunity to answer the questions and expand on her presentation.
So with that, welcome to all of you who've joined us for this conversation.
Chris, I'm really looking forward to this. This is an important and timely and interesting book.
It also coincides today with the judgement just passed by the European Court of Justice
banning indiscriminate mass surveillance by governments unless for clearly defined purposes,
period of time and with limited retention of data. So quite a timely, I think, reminder of just the big stakes that that cursus new book is about.
So, Charissa, we look forward to hearing your talk first and then we will take it from there.
Thank you so much for us once. So I'll give just a little presentation about the books that just give you an overview of what the book is about.
I started getting interested in privacy about six or seven years ago, and it started as a very personal concern.
I went with my mom to the archives in Spain to dig out the history of my family,
and we learnt all sorts of things that my grandparents hadn't told us.
And I started wondering whether we had a right to know those things, whether I had a right to maybe write about those things.
And of course, being a philosopher, I turned to philosophy for some answers and I wasn't very satisfied with the answers I got.
And I thought, surely we have to work more on this topic.
There isn't or there wasn't a lot of work on privacy in philosophy at that time.
And just around the time, Snowden revealed that the world was being subject to mass surveillance by intelligence agencies.
I thought that was amazing. That really impacted me in a very deep way and that became a professional interest.
I started researching it as a philosopher and I ended up writing my dissertation in Oxford on the ethics and politics of privacy.
And the more I read about privacy, the more alarmed I get.
I got about how dangerous it is to collect so much data, keep it indefinitely on the population.
It really seemed to me that the system of the data economy that we have built is absolutely insane.
It's a ticking bomb. I wrote this book in that kind of feeling of urgency, an alarm that we're doing something that's not very wise.
That has led to rising trouble in the past. That's something that has happened in the past, is very likely to happen in the future again.
And to try to change this. So the first part of the book is a bit of about how much data is being collected on you.
Everybody knows that data is being collected on you. Well, that's very abstract.
And data has a way of being sounding very abstract and sounding very innocuous.
And I go through a whole day in somebody's life to just illustrate how much data.
Tech giants and governments and other corporations are collecting on us.
So some examples are they thought is being shared about you, includes your name, your age, where you live, where you work, who you sleep next to,
whether you sleep well or not, what you eat, whether you smoke, how much you drink,
how much you weigh your credit history, your browsing history, your purchasing history.
It's incredibly detailed. And many inferences can be made from my data,
from your life expectancy to the kind of diseases that you might have in the future to whether you're employable in a certain kind of job,
whether you will pay back a loan. And all these data is being used to make decisions about our life that are impacting us in very deep ways.
We you might get rejected by for a job or a loan or an apartment, and you might not know what piece of data exactly was the culprit for that.
And for all you know, a piece of data might be inaccurate and we don't have access to that or any way to correct it or appeal.
Many decisions are made on us. Furthermore,
another motivation for me to write this book is to refuse a very common myth and a very common
conception of privacy is something that's just a personal preference or an individual preference.
And the idea is that it's up to you how much data you want to share.
And if you're OK with sharing data, then you have no reason not to.
And what I argue is not actually privacy is a political concern.
Above all, privacy is collective in a way that this myth of privacy is personal doesn't really misguiding.
So your data contains data about other people. If you share your genetic data, you shared data about your kids,
your parents or siblings and even very different things that can be affected by that sharing of data and sometimes in a very profound way.
So they could be deported. They could be jailed. They could have they could be denied certain kinds of insurance.
And you have no control over how that data will be used and you probably won't know what happens to it.
The book then explains how did we get here?
It seems that, you know, if you were to explain the system from to somebody from the 1950s, they would say, well, that's crazy.
Like what? Why did you do that? And so it explains a bit how we came to this point in history with the hope that
understanding how it came about might help us in getting out of this situation.
And the way it came about was Google was a protagonist in this story.
And a lot other companies are already realised that they could use personal data to target ads.
And this became incredibly profitable. And it became it became refined to a very large degree so that you could profile somebody for where they live,
their gender, their political tendencies, their fears or desires or their ailments and so on into us.
A new one. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States had recommended to Congress
that they regulate data because they saw that this could be something dangerous.
And many of the advice given was along the lines of the GDP.
That came afterwards in Europe. And just then 9/11 happened, and that changed everything because suddenly privacy regulation got shelved.
Security became the absolute absolute priority in governments lists of objectives and
intelligence agents since figured that they could actually make a copy of the data.
They could make a copy of all the data that was being gathered and use it for intelligence purposes.
Now, as I argue in the book and elsewhere in my book and in my work.
It turns out that full data collection is not the kind of thing that is very useful to prevent terrorism,
because terrorism is a very rare event such that it seems that we made this incredible
sacrifice of our privacy and we're not really getting what we were promised to get in return.
So the third chapter talks about how personal data is a kind of power.
And one of the reasons why the big tech giants crept up on us was that we didn't recognise it as a kind of power because it's new.
So we're used to political power. We're used to economic power. We know how military power works.
And one of the characteristics of power, and this is an insight from the philosopher Bertrand Russell,
is that it can change from one kind of to another like energy. So if you have enough money, you can influence politics.
If you have enough political power, you can influence and have a big military power and so on.
Good regulation is one that stops one kind of power from turning into another.
So it was a function in society is one in which no matter how much money you have, you can buy votes and you can buy politicians.
And there's this other kind of power that is related to personal data and privacy.
And I argue that what's special about this power is that it creates the opportunity to influence behaviour and predict behaviour.
I. This is the reason why data is so coveted.
It's not only that it can be sold. Technically, Google and Facebook don't really sell your data.
They sell the power to influence you. They sell your attention and access to you.
And this is why we didn't realise what was going on, because we didn't know the narrative that this was a deal that, you know,
you you got to to give your personal data in return for all these wonderful services is a
narrative that came way after the fact when the date that the deal had already been struck.
Just go back and try to remember the first time you open an e-mail account.
It probably never occurred to you that you were giving up your your personal data.
It wasn't transparent. We learnt about the system when it was already entrenched and it surprised us
because we had this litmus test test for whether something was a monopoly.
And the litmus test is something is a monopoly or can be suspicious of being a monopoly if the company can make the prices go up.
I'm not losing customers, but here you have companies that supposedly give free services,
although they are placing extremely exploitative conditions and they don't lose customers.
But the litmus test failed because there wasn't a price tag involved and there wasn't a price tag because we are the product.
We're not the customer. If the customers aren't our advertising companies and other companies that want access to that data.
So we have to think more deeply about the relationship between personal data and power
and realise that we are giving up too much power when we give up too much personal data.
You would give up too much of our personal data to corporations.
We shouldn't be surprised that the rule that the wealthy rule and make the rules of our society,
if we give too much of our personal data to governments, we shouldn't be surprised if we start sliding into authoritarian tendencies.
And I argue that for democracy to be strong, the citizenry has to be in charge of data and in control of personal data.
In particular, I argue that we should think about personal data as a kind of toxic asset.
And Bush Nido was the first person to argue for this. And I kind of expound on that.
And I make an analogy to asbestos. Asbestos is a very useful material.
It's very cheap to mine and it's very valuable because it avoids buildings from catching fire for it, for instance.
And so we used it in a lot of things like walls and and buildings and plumbing.
And then we realised it's incredibly toxic and there's no safe threshold.
So hundreds of thousands of people die every year as a consequence of cancer caused by asbestos.
I mean, the same way personal data is very cheap to mine. It's easy to get is very valuable.
It's very helpful. But it turns out it has these risks that we're not paying attention to and that can really poison our societies.
It can poison individuals by making us vulnerable to harm, like discrimination, public humiliation, extortion and so on.
And it can poison societies by eroding democracy and eroding equality.
We are not being treated as equals anymore. We are being treated on the basis of our data.
And that means that some of us are treated better than others, depending on how much money we have,
whether we're poor or rich, whether we're fat or slim, whether we're men or women.
And that should worry us. So in the last two chapters of the book, I come up with some solutions.
We need regulation. There's no way around it.
But I argue that for regulation to happen, we, the public to be more aware of the situation and to demand that privacy be respected in there.
There are other examples historically in which public pressure is really what has to build up before regulation happens and for regulation to happen.
So I argue that we should end the data economy. This is crazy.
Personal data shouldn't be the kind of thing that can be bought or sold as long as personal data is profitable in that way.
It will be misused and it will be used against. It goes against you.
Against us. So I argue that's just as you know it, even in the most capitalist capitalist societies,
we agree that there are certain things that should be off the market, like organs, like people like votes and like the results of sports matches.
Personal data should be on that list.
And if anybody wants to do something with personal data, of course, we should allow them to in many cases because it's valuable.
So in order for you to get medical care, you have to give some personal data to your doctor.
But those people who manage our data have to be tied to fiduciary duties,
fiduciary duties or duties that apply to professional relationships in which there is a symmetry of power.
So your doctor knows a lot more about my son than you do.
You have a level position because you often feel ill when you go to the doctor and fiduciary duties,
meaning that the doctor has to put your interests first. And whenever there's a conflict of interest, your interests come first.
So if the doctor would like to perform surgery on you because they would really like to practise their skills or have a data point,
they can't do that only if it will benefit you. First and foremost, in the same way,
your financial adviser has to advise you in a way that will protect your own interests if they have interests because
they want to buy a particular stock to try out how it goes or because they have financial interests in that.
That's not good enough. So in the same way, if a company wants to do something innovative with data, then by all means let's allow it,
but only if they can assure us that that data will be used in our interest and never against us.
I have other regulatory proposals like banning personalised content.
It seems that the disadvantages are much, many more than the advantages.
And it's a tool that is being used for political manipulation and the gerrymandering of democracy.
And it's too dangerous. And apart from that, we should delete data.
It's too dangerous to keep it. They've had just stored there for as long as possible.
So whenever we have used data, we should read it periodically. We should have much better cybersecurity measures.
Currently, the Internet is incredibly insecure. It says, look, you're in order to allow for the collection of personal data.
And that puts us all at risk. Just to give an example, if hackers were to have just 10 percent of electrical appliances in any country and
electrical appliances are increasingly connected to the Internet and smart appliances,
they could bring down the national grid and that would be incredibly dangerous.
Imagine being in a pandemic, being in lockdown and having the national grid just not work.
That would be a catastrophe.
So really, we have an interest as a society for democracy, but also just for security to have much, much better privacy regulations.
And finally, at the end of the book, I propose some ways in which individuals can protect their own privacy and the privacy of others around them.
So it is a way to create public pressure.
Not only will protect your privacy if you say stop using Google search and start using ducktail go, but it also sends out a statement.
It says, I care about privacy. I'm not consenting to this data economy, despite what companies say.
And it creates a data trail as well.
So every time, for instance, you ask a company for your data or you ask a company to delete your data even if you don't get a satisfying response.
It creates a data trail such that when that company has to phase data regulators,
data regulators can have evidence that customers and users are actually not consenting to that kind of treatment and that they should be treated,
that those companies should be treated accordingly. So that's an overview of the book.
I hope you read it. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please tell me what you think.
Thanks very much, Chris. I mean, I'll hold you sort of second.
The suggestion that people buy the book and read the book, I think it's a really important topic and a very challenging book also,
because I think if you just went through or as a you you sort of shine a light on some of the collective
decisions that are made in societies and some of the for profit decisions made by individual companies,
but also at the possible acquiescence that each of us engage in individually.
You know, I have what APEN Moken from Columbia Law School called a machine that spies on me for a living in my pocket every day.
And it is arguably busy spying on me right now,
as I suspect many people not but not all on this cold will have maybe a few questions to kick us off before we open up.
And I'll remind people again to police used to ask a question function on the broadcast platform,
and then I will take questions from there to field to Charissa later on in the conversation.
But maybe just a few things to get us started. I think your your analogy of data to a toxic asset is one of the really arresting
parts of the book and really a powerful metaphor for where we might be.
I wonder whether you can share with those who've joined the conversation today
a bit more about how you think about where we are at this moment in time,
about how much we know about the demonstrable harm of the kind of data collection that
you're concerned about in the book by states and by for profit private companies.
Do you think that we are closer to sort of the, say, tobacco and cancer link?
You know, I happen to sit right now in the 30 Naum Gardens building in Oxford where Richard Doll did pioneering work in demonstrating that link.
Do you think we're at the stage where there is a large volume of peer reviewed scientific
work that points in the same direction of identifying a demonstrable objective harm?
Would you think we're closer perhaps to the, say,
the genetically modified food discussion where I think it's fair to say that there the science is sort of less consensual,
arguably, and there may even be some scientists who believe that the harm is actually not demonstrated before.
There might still be a case for precautionary principle because the possible harm might be very dramatic and well beyond the modest,
pragmatic gains that could be realised. Where do you feel we are with US toxicity, if you will?
Is this sort of demonstrated fact or is it more about a precautionary principle at this stage?
That's an excellent question. I would argue it's a demonstrated fact with the caveat that with political and economic issues,
there's always more controversy as to cordillo relationships than with biological matters.
But I think history teaches us that this has already happened.
I mean, if it has already happened, it will happen again. In the book, I tell the.
Sorry about the Nazis when the Nazis invaded a city,
one of the first things they did was to go to the registry because they wanted to find the Jewish population.
And that's where the data was as to where Jewish people lived.
And when you compare the death rates of the Jewish population between the Netherlands and France, it's really striking.
I think the most important difference between the Netherlands and France was how much data they collected on the census.
France had made a conscious decision for privacy reasons not to collect certain kinds of data related to religious affiliation,
ancestry and location of, say, your grandparents and so on.
Whereas the Netherlands had collected incredible amounts of information because there was
this one person called a Lynx who was a fan of statistics and he wanted to create a system.
This is a direct quote that followed people from cradle to grave.
In fact, he invented the I.D. cards and these these made a huge difference in the Netherlands.
The Nazis found 75 percent of the Jewish population and exterminated them.
And whereas in France, they only found them killed. Twenty five percent of the Jewish population.
And that means hundreds of thousands of people, in particular in France.
There was this person called Frank Gaffney, who was the general counter of the army.
And he was here. He was. He told the Nazi that because the census didn't have this data,
he would be in charge of creating a new census in which the data would be collected about Jewish ancestry.
And he made this effort. What the Nazis didn't know was this was that.
But it got to me was one of the most important people in the French Resistance.
And he never intended to collect the data.
So what he did was basically he hacked the Hollerith machines that were being used by IBM to with punch cards such that the question number eleven,
which was about Jewish ancestry, never got recorded. And by not collecting that data, he saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
So we already know how data collection can be so dangerous and how he has it has led to genocide.
And we can see in China, for instance, how surveillance is being used to control the population like that.
Will Europe, but also during the pandemic. There have been incredible intrusions into the privacy of people such and what we're already seeing,
seeing much more rebelliousness from the Chinese population than in the past.
And likewise, if you think about other kinds of authoritarian regimes,
they tend to have a pretty strong surveillance police, just like the Stazi or the KGB in Russia.
I mean, I think your your your example is a powerful one in particular, the contemporary one of mainland China.
I think this is a striking and deeply worrying one, though.
I suppose your historical example, General Eisenhower might have said that the allies went straight for the registries
as well because they want to find the Nazis and the data can be arguably,
while clearly dangerous. As you powerfully illustrate, and sometimes she puts a different uses.
I want to pick up on your on this really powerful examples that you offer about, say, you know,
the historical records of, say, the KGB and the Nazis or today of mainland China's treatment of workers in particular,
you use the term surveillance society throughout the book, which is a I think,
a powerful description of where we are, both in terms of state surveillance and corporate surveillance today.
And you argue that the data economy has to sort of be brought to an end, at least as we know it today,
and replaced with something that puts the citizen at the centre of this.
I wonder whether you want to share with the listeners your thoughts on whether in the interim period before the data economy is perhaps abolished.
You think there are sort of important distinctions to be made between different societies and different companies, say,
between mainland China versus the European Union versus the United States or even between individual companies between,
say, Facebook or Google or Apple or other of that sort of tech giants that are central to the collection of data at scale,
or whether you think that that is sort of enters into sort of a form of moral relativism.
That's a little bit like sort of arguing over drinks for the fascism when that system is worse or,
you know, Saugerties and the CHERIAN is more Naziism is worse.
Is this is this for you something that is so clearly a violation of our fundamental rights and our autonomy as citizens,
no matter how it's practised or or or do you want to draw out some differences you think that
are meaningful between how different societies and different companies engage in surveillance?
Yeah, I think there's some meaningful differences. The most meaningful difference is asking how does this company make their money?
And whenever a company makes their money through data,
that is the most concerning case by far because they depend on that data and they'll do anything to protect it.
So when one of those companies claims the pair about your privacy, you should be very,
very suspicious because they are making their money through your personal data.
So I do think that companies that use data, but not in the way that funds their services,
are much less dangerous and also much more open to kind of changing in ways that might empower the citizenry and that might put
the data in our control rather than keeping the data because they don't have such so much financial incentive in the same way,
even though both citizens in China and citizens in the West are subjected to a huge amount of surveillance.
There are still many very meaningful differences. And one of the meaningful differences is that if you and I argue for this in the book,
and that's one of the essences of liberalism, I think if you commit a minor infraction in the West,
say you have a party at your place and things get a little bit out of hand,
then music is really loud and your neighbours are pretty upset that they call the police.
So they call the police, comes to your place, they knock on the door and say, hey, keep it down and lower the music.
And that's it. That's it for you. Those are the consequences if it's contained.
And at most, you know, your neighbours are not going to like you very much, but you'll be in China when you do something like that.
It sounds against your credit. Social credit. No.
So that could have effects on whether you get a job next month or whether you
can travel as a VIP in certain kinds of trains or certain kinds of hotels.
And that kind of system is much more totalitarian because every little thing that you do counts towards how you're being treated in general.
Now, I fear that we're sliding into that in the West. And when China gets criticised for this many times, what people say is, hey,
that's an unfair criticism, because in the West, you're doing exactly the same.
And it's even worse because you don't even tell people who make people think that they're OK.
It's not happening. And there's some truth to that. So in the West, there are systems, for instance,
if you're living in the United States and you buy something and you're not happy with the products, then you call customer service.
The timing that you spend waiting might depend on what kind of customer you are on your personal data,
whether you have a lot of money, whether you're some somebody influential.
And that's something that we don't get told that about how we are being treated.
So one of my fears is that we're sliding more and more into that. Direction of society.
And I don't think we want that. I don't think that's that's a smart way to go.
And we should try to start walking the other way.
Well, for those worried about what Henry Luce called the American Century, perhaps weight passing judgement, will you see what might come next?
One could offer. Maybe just one last question for me before I start taking questions from the ask a question function again,
please use to ask a question function and I will pick questions from there for Carosa to respond to.
You know, one thing.
One theme you strike at throughout the book and also spoken very powerfully to just now in your presentation is the idea of a choice.
You write in the book that we've been asked to give up our personal data in the name of the public good.
I wondered whether you want to expand a little bit on how sort of a much you feel that this has really been a choice.
And I suppose in particular,
whether you have any reflections on the legitimacy of this choice and in particular whether it's possible that people may be what I think some
commentators and certainly some industry spokespeople have called privacy
pragmatists that more or less knowingly decide to listen to your argumentation,
say, well, we like convenient things as supported by data driven at at economies.
So thanks very much for the warning. But, you know, we like our search engines and our social media and and our mobile phone.
So we will just carry on with your warning in mind. How much of a choice do you really think this has been for us as individual citizens?
Is this sort of is this sort of something that's akin to climate change where I think
one candidate recently argued that we have quite a lot of agency as individuals. And I can't you know,
I can't foist on the state and on big companies the responsibility I take on as a
consumer when I decide to jet around the world and emit tons of carbon into the air.
That is my responsibility as it is my choice. And I have to answer for that. Or do you think it's sort of close to something that's structural,
where it's not really meaningful to talk about a choice that I make as a consumer when I have something that spies on me in my pocket?
I think we didn't have a choice. I think we got duped into the system.
And once it was there and once we learnt to read, they told us, well, this was the deal.
You knew about it. Do you think the terms and conditions when everybody knows that nobody can possibly win a
race are conditions and we don't even understand them and they can change at any point?
So I don't think we had a choice.
I think now we have a choice because now we know, now we know what's going on and we have a choice in the sense that we have.
Agency in pushing the direction of our society one way or another, if you try your best to protect your privacy.
I can tell you now you'll fail. But it doesn't matter. You don't have to be perfect.
You don't have to achieve perfect privacy to make a big, big, big impact.
So I think people would be amazed at how much companies and governments are worried about what they think.
Their opinions are being monitored on social media all the time.
And companies are very sensitive if they start realising that privacy can be a competitive advantage.
Things will change pretty quickly.
So in a way, it's it's something like climate change because we have now the agency to push towards one way or another.
So one of the aspects of your question, you ask, well, what what people just say, OK,
you know, thank you for the warning, but I'd rather have a really convenient things.
There are two answers to that.
One is you don't have to give up convenience so you can have signal and have much more privacy than with other message messenger apps.
And it's the same thing. It's not going to make you lose anything. So this is another kind of myth that I think is completely wrong,
that we have to choose between privacy and cutting that tech and cutting edge tech know cutting edge tech can work perfectly fine.
Protecting privacy and the data economy is just a business model.
We can fund these things in a different way so you don't have to choose. So that's one answer.
And the second answer is. One of the unfortunate characteristics of people that often you don't realise how important it is until you lose it.
I want to lose it. It's too late. You kind of recall it. So once you know your identity gets stolen, you have to go on trial to try to defend that.
It wasn't you who committed that crime. Your privacy has already done that, you know, being stolen and the damage has been done in a way.
So because there is this collective aspect to privacy and I argue that privacy is collective,
it's not clear to me that we have the moral authority as individuals to say, you know,
I choose to give up my privacy because you are choosing to give up our security.
And that matters as a society. So I think even if people were to say, well, you know, I'm not that worried,
they're wrong and we should take measures in just like, you know, we should take measures in public health issues or in ecology,
even if there are some people who think, well, I don't have any kids and I don't care about what happens to the world in 20 years time or read,
so I'll just bike and pollute as much as possible.
I mean, thanks for for this, because I think in some ways this really puts it on the point for me in a sense that, you know, I, like you,
was very struck by the Snowden revelations of mass government surveillance,
piggybacking off the infrastructures built by private for profit companies in 2013.
And all the revelations have enabled by his very brave act since by The Guardian, The New York Times and others.
And at the same time, I have to be honest and say, you know, I didn't change very much in my behaviour.
You know, I felt like I learnt something.
And I think there was an intrinsic value to knowing something about societies, the sites being intelligible rather than opaque.
But at the same time, I suppose that my sort of in practise,
my thinking as a citizen was that there are different incommensurate values here and a traditional conception of privacy is one of them.
But it may not be the only one. And that I might have felt as a citizen that my autonomy was in fact enhanced by the data economy.
That was so demonstrably problematic in many different ways that you outlined so powerfully in the book.
And I really appreciate the book in part because it calls up people like me for being immoral, basically.
And I think it really puts it a very sort of a clear point on why it's important
to read your book and really think about the choices that we make individually.
But perhaps more importantly, as societies now, as promised, now I'll open up and start looking at the questions.
Just bear me with me for a few seconds as I start picking a few questions.
Syria. Let's start with a question from Anna, who notes that you've been you know,
that you've written that six years ago when you started the work on this topic, that few people were interested in discussing privacy.
What are the what are the sort of the changes you would most like to see in the six years after this book?
I would like to see much more regulatory changes. I would like to see, like really important steps for banning the data economy.
And I'm optimistic in the sense that the US is discussing different privacy bills.
And I think it's a matter of time before they happen.
I am also would like to see much more effort from the part of companies to be serious about privacy and to offer privacy as a competitive advantage.
And I think people will start choosing privacy more and more. In a recent survey, I carried on with John Brooke from from Oxford.
We found out that 92 percent of people have had some kind of bad experience with privacy.
So I think privacy is something that we forgot because it was relatively successful until the digital age.
And then, you know, these tech companies told us, hey, you don't need to worry about this isn't a thing of the past.
And we sort of trusted them for a while. And now we're realising, no, actually, this is harming us.
And more and more people are having bad experiences.
I mean, there we are having bad experiences or we know somebody who had their credit card number stolen, who had a troll.
I'd do something online to them who are suffered doxing. There's many kinds of harms.
And as that's happened, I think people will make more of an effort to choose privacy.
Thanks. I'm going to continue on with a question from Christina, who I think sort of presents a of a version of the situation I described in myself.
I am Marylee a moral. You know, I have sort of brought about these things and sort of, I suppose, in practise decided just to carry on.
But Christina rightly draws our attention to the so-called privacy paradox that there often
is a discrepancy between people sort of expressed privacy concerns in surveys and the like.
And then there are actual documented online behaviour.
So Christina asks, you know, how can we convince people that their privacy should not be traded for efficiency?
How can we sort of sensitise people to a danger that is not immediately pressing?
I think there are many hypotheses for why the privacy paradox comes about.
My own view is that it comes about because we feel we don't really have a choice.
You think, OK, why am I going to protect my privacy if I know that I'm being surveilled anyway, if I'm trying?
You know, why would I choose not to plead no to cookies when I know, like these other things that I'm not even being asked about are going on?
And what I'm trying to argue in this book is that it matters if you don't you shouldn't think like,
oh, well, either I protect my privacy perfectly or nothing makes a difference.
Every little time you say I choose privacy.
It gets recorded and it matters and it creates public pressure.
So I want to offer people a view both of how much it matters to resist, how much they can resist.
And what are the alternatives for them to resist.
And I'm hoping that this might motivate us to be a bit more privacy conscious and a bit more coherent
with our beliefs because it's certain such it's a direct continuation of this sort of area of enquiry.
I'm going to pick one next. It's from Anna that she argues that surveillance capitalism as sort of a subset of the sort of surveillance society term,
effectively outsourced to privacy management and guilt for this possible privacy mismanagement to us as individuals.
And she is interested in your thoughts on what, if anything,
we can do to recollect Tobi's this and make this as a society level choice rather than something that each of us feel we have to navigate ourselves.
One cookie banner at a time. There are few possibilities.
Some people discuss the possibility of Batur trusts that could work, it would work something like a union, but might be a way to go.
But I find that more practical. Just to think of regulation.
We don't have to cheque whether what we buy in the supermarket is edible every single time.
How does that happen? Well, it happened through a process of regulation.
So I think we've got we're going through a process of civilisation that was that
is similar to what we saw in the offline world that made the world more liveable.
Like we don't have to cheque whether our aeroplane has gone through security cheques.
We can trust that our countries are run well enough that somebody is taking that.
And in fact, we have much less, many less accidents than we used to have.
So I think it ends up having to be through regulation, but regulation will only happen when there is enough people asking for it.
And I think there are a lot of politicians that want to protect their privacy,
but they need to know that they have the citizenry backing them up in order to
really be able to face these tech giants that put enormous pressure on them.
I mean,
I wonder whether it's maybe worth pursuing this a little bit further and just sort of to to hear any sort of further thoughts you have in the book.
You you powerfully describe as sort of essentially a triangle with some element of a zero sum game between,
you know, a state as source of power for governments,
a state, a source of power for private for profit companies or a state, a source of power for us as individuals, as member of the public, as citizens.
I mean, I am I'm encouraged by your description of sort of the history of regulation in the 20th and 21st century.
I mean, I suppose it it it might come across as sort of quite an optimistic take, if you will.
I think it's true that there are areas in which we have made progress and we arguably live in societies where we have at least privileged
parts of the world have to be less afraid that someone's going to poison us just to make a quick buck than many people had to be very,
very afraid of early in the 20th century.
And of course, many people have to be very afraid of across the world, including being poisoned by Western companies,
selling various things that are not actually fit for human consumption.
But I think something that you that you made quite explicit at the beginning of your conversation, too,
and that is quite present in the book as well, is that while for profit companies are often the sort of the interface, if you will,
further this data collection for us, whether it's tech giants or EIAs piece or other or, you know,
back end consumer data inside, companies like Oxfam and others are often sort of the interface that we encounter as citizens.
It seems naive after the Snowden revelations to discount that the state is not a disinterested party, to put it mildly,
and that it might in fact be quite convenient from the point of view of quite a lot of sort of executive arm functions, law enforcement, security,
but also more benign ones, if you will, public health and others to have, you know,
mass surveillance available and and to be able to either dip in and selectively or just,
you know, get all of it through the back doors as we now know that some governments have done.
And in that sense,
I just wonder whether is there a risk sometimes in these discussions that we get so focussed on the very real problems that a number
of for profit private companies are are central to that we forget that the state is not a impartial and disinterested actor in this,
but actually arguably quite central and in some countries extremely central to this whole situation and quite happy with it.
That's an excellent point.
From the start, the surveillance society has been a covenant between private and public institutions and it happens all the time.
And data that you give to companies ends up in the government and data you give to government ends up with companies.
But one reason for optimism is that I think the first reaction to 9/11 was very short sighted.
It was a panicked reaction. It was a reaction that was meant to show citizens that something was being done.
I mean, in part because at the beginning, of course, it was secret.
But I think more and more governments are realising how dangerous it is for national security to have this insecure Internet.
And that is incredibly valuable to us as citizens on a very important realisation.
So you're seeing now, for instance, how the U.S. doesn't want to tick tock and to function with China and how more and more these
kind of tech companies are having to put in security frameworks for national security purposes.
Another example that I give in the book is where the Grinder and how, you know,
dating apps are being checked out by by intelligence agencies because it's so easy to get very
sensitive information from people who work in the government and then possibly to blackmail them.
There are many security risks there. So I think that gives governments an incentive to make the Internet much more secure.
And we should use that to leverage our case. Another point is that governments are usually I mean,
especially democratic governments are not like a whole institution that always thinks the same thing and they're not an individual.
There are many parts to government and we have to make sure that while intelligence agencies are important and their voice should be heard,
there are these other aspects to good democracy that may be just as important or more important and that,
you know, we should kind of have a view of what kind of society we want to live in rather
than make these very shortsighted decisions that might take us in a wrong turn.
Thank you. There's a question here from Martin Butler that I think is pertinent to this.
I mean, Martin asks, given the business models the tech giants use to, you know,
that that depends on using our data, at least for some of them, as you argue.
This is absolutely essential for others. It's sort of additive. Is it likely that we would ever be able to take back control of the state?
And if I may sort of expand on Martin's important question.
If we turn for a moment from whether we as citizens can influence governments,
which you rightly argue are not from a unitary actress with a single interest to thinking about common companies, I mean, no.
One question, Martin's question whether this is ever going to happen.
I suppose it's a cholera question is let's imagine you had half an hour with Mark Zuckerberg or some other CHA.
You know, is there a case that you could make sure either of them about how it might be in the
long term interests of their company or their shareholder to clean up their act?
Or is your message to them go to hell? So, yes, I think it can definitely happen again.
If you look at history, there are things that have happened, good things that we never thought it was remotely possible.
A minor thing was just the GDP. When I started working on privacy, people laughed at me.
Really like privacy. And what I mean, you're just doing history. You're not doing all day philosophy.
And the DPR seemed like something impossible.
It's not perfect, but for all its faults, it's a real high apsos in history and we have to acknowledge that.
And more importantly, things like democracy are votes for women or the Internet or getting rid of slavery.
These things were things that didn't seem possible at some point. And in particular with slavery, for instance,
there was a very strong argument that it wasn't just not economically feasible to get rid of slavery, and yet we did.
And of course, you know, slavery was much worse than the data economy in many, many ways and not trying to make an analogy.
But the point is that we have done things in history that didn't seem possible.
And again, with regulation regarding safety and food and so on, these things,
if you were to tell like somebody who lives in the fourteen hundreds or fifteen hundreds.
How the world has developed, they would be very surprised that we have Muna's degree of organisation and affordance.
There are many reasons for pessimism as well. But we should focus on the things that we've done.
And I want to Facebook. I think I would say, look, you're just you have a business model that's based in the past.
If you want to survive, you have to reinvent yourself.
Just like oil companies will have to reinvent themselves because there are certain kinds of models are just not sustainable.
It's a it's a if I may make a personal observation, it's refreshing to meet someone who is an optimist in October 2020 and a real inspiration.
And I applaud and admire your optimism. I suppose your.
Person from the Fortune Hundred, if you're told someone from ancient Rome how they lived in the Fortune hundreds.
You know, she would think that the world had gone to hell in a handbasket.
So I suppose I remain mixed on my belief in sort of the arc of history going in the right direction always.
Nonetheless, let's turn to Jules questions that have been sort of a couple of questions and jewels that are along the same lines,
old tech cherished privilege of consolidating them. But I mean, effectively, you know,
given that we have lift through sort of a period of various of rampant data collection by private companies and by some governments,
and arguably a lot of this data is stored, sometimes obtained using dubious methods,
at best a grey zone and worst things that that are at the very least against terms of service and arguably often illegal.
You know, do you think there is a world in which it becomes possible to essentially get the state of the lead at?
I think so. I think it's necessary. And he's one of the things that we have to really change how we think about data.
Data should never be held for as long as possible.
That's that's just crazy. So we need to implement systems in which they took it's routinely deleted for safety reasons.
And it's not going to be easy. And we need better ways of auditing data.
So one of the challenges we have is whether there can be a way to design data systems such that you can know exactly where your data is,
that your data is tagged, such that you could have an app or some kind of platform in which you could track it and you
would have control of deleting it and you could cheque that it was deleted at the same time,
but might create a privacy risk because, of course, tagging data means that it's being tied to you.
And somebody like Tim Bergonzi, the creator of the World Wide Web, is working on such a system that's called solid.
And we'll see if if it's possible. That would be an incredible achievement for privacy because it's so central to this question.
I'm going to dive down that list a little bit and surface a question from our colleague, Peter Milliken.
Because it is essentially isn't this question of data that's already been collected.
And Peter asks effectively, he asked whether our rights expire or the moment we do so.
Do you think that people ought to be accorded the right to privacy after they are dead?
And would you apply the same constraints as you would apply to the living even after someone has been dead for, say, 100 years?
That's a question that has been in my mind since I started researching my family's history.
And originally I had thought that would be the main question. My dissertation, I never got to it.
I still haven't got through it. I'm afraid to say so. I'm not sure.
I don't think I would give it exactly the same value, but I think it has some value.
So I think there are certain interests of the living that are more important than the interests of the dead.
But I think there's something to be said for some kind of privacy rights after that.
So say, you know, if there's going to be something that will totally ruin your reputation and that is done in the public interest,
I mean, it's not relevant for the kind of contribution you have made to society.
I think there is some kind of argument to limit what we can share, say, for instance, unhealth data,
if nobody's going to benefit from, you know, in a medical way here, we could look at the laws in Germany.
Germany is one of the countries that recognises our right to privacy after death.
But it's still something to work on for me in the future. Thanks, Chris.
I'm going to turn to a question that Stephen Lawrence has raised in the Q and A,
which is effectively is a sort of another dimension of the sort of reformist project that's been quite central to the discussion tonight,
which is what do you think about the standard of data privacy, education, schools?
And more broadly, your thoughts on what sort of education and awareness raising in this broader area?
And Stephen remarks that, you know, in his experience, it's it's with conversation with family and the like.
It's quite hard to get people to care as they do not see the harm, perhaps members of Stephen's family,
maybe immoral people like myself, or they're not, at least in court in the privacy paradox that was raised before.
I have a whole section in the book on children because I think it's so important.
And I worry about us bringing up children in these surveillance society in which
we teach them the essentially writes the matter because their privacy is a right.
But, you know, it doesn't really apply.
And in which we don't let them mature, because I think there is a lot to be said for growing up without being watched all the time.
That makes you into a functional adult. I mean, if you watch it all the time, there are things that you might not question.
There are things that you might not do. And there are ways in which you might not develop. In schools, I think this is changing a lot.
It's changing a lot also depending on the country in the US. It's quite frightening the degree to which children are being surveilled.
They're being surveilled for what they search on online.
What messages they send even between themselves and their biometric details getting collected.
And, of course, with a pandemic, this has become a lot worse because a lot of children having to do some having to learn online
and don't really have a choice but to engage with platforms that are not very privacy friendly.
I think the consequences of these are are still to be felt. And that's one of the dangers that once we really feel them, it'll be too late.
But a few of the things that I worry about is not giving people a chance to really mature.
Not giving them the chance to explore topics that might be controversial because of the fear
that they will be punished or some somehow have bad consequences for them from their teachers,
from society, from prospective employers, from universities when they apply to university, but also how they might be disadvantaged.
With respect to previous generations in that's everything they do can have a consequence.
Every game they play could be used to infer further IQ abilities and then make them unemployable.
Or any any party they they go to. They have to be aware of how everything that could be broadcasted, every picture that is taking on them.
And I think this is this has a risk of creating people who are.
Very pain. Who or who would have to comply with very strict rules in order to be a functional member of society.
Thank you. Let's just have a final last question before we wrap this up, which is, I think, to sort of bring out some of the sort of truly political,
really a nature of a lot of the argument and also the position that you advocate yourself.
I mean, I guess sort of simplifying, exaggerating, at least in Europe.
I think you can say that the liberal tradition was always historically more afraid of the state and state abuse of power than anything else.
And the socialists and sort of Christian Democrat tradition in some extent were actually more afraid of capitalism,
really, than they than they were of the state. And Social Democrats were equally afraid of both of them.
So. So where would you put yourself? Is it the state we have to worry the most about?
Is it capitalism we have to worry the most about or is it both? It's both.
It's always hard data being treated in ways that can be against us and not for us.
So I think we are having fiduciary duties as one of the most important elements of what I propose.
Well, Social Democrats may not be able to win any elections in any actually accessing European countries,
but I'm sure they'll be reassured by the thought that they might still have a chance. In Oxford seminars, at least something beats nothing.
As I like to say, I think we should sort of probably wrap it up here.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us on this call today.
Again, I want to recommend buying Chris's book Privacy's Power, which I can't help but notice,
is entirely accidentally on display in the background of Cursus living room, which is I I'm sure it's always standing like that.
I warmly recommend that. And I genuinely meant what I said along the way, that I think this is such an important and interesting book,
in part because it really challenges the sort of the sort of the acquiescence or pragmatic compliance, if you will,
that people like myself and I and I suspect at least some people have joined the conversation they have engaged in and really challenges, I think,
to think in much bigger terms about what the long term societal and collective consequences
are of individual discrete decisions that may seem quite innocent on their own.
But at that, that carries a really, I think,
challenge us to think about in a very different light in a very powerful book that I hope all of you will buy and read.
So thanks to all of you for joining us today. Thanks for all the questions and apologies for not marching us through all of them.
And thanks. Of course, more than anything to you. Charissa, for this really interesting, important book and for your time this evening.
Thank you so much for us. It has been a lot of fun. And just to end.
I would like to just invite people who think that it might be crazy to call for an end to the data economy,
given how important it is just to think about how crazy it is to have a business
model that depends on the massive and systematic violation of everybody's rights.
What a powerful place to am. Thank you so much, Charism. Thank you. Good evening, all.