Welcome, everybody. This is a very exciting occasion. It's the first ever event of Oxfords New Institute for Ethics in A.I.
My name is John to Pseudolus and I'm the director of the institute.
And it's with great pleasure that I'm chairing our event today, which is the launch of Charissa Liz's important new book, Privacy is Power.
Why and How you should take back control of your data.
Garissa is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University and a tutorial fellow at Harvard College.
She's also a colleague of mine in the new Institute for Ethics in a I.
Her book is Engaged Philosophy, and it's best engaging with a momentous contemporary issue.
The threat to privacy in a world of surveillance, capitalism written in clear,
attractive prose that is fired by a real moral passion, reminiscent in many ways of Peter Singer's writings on animal liberation.
Although here it's humans who are being liberated just in a brief way.
I want to highlight three ways in which the book is especially valuable. First, it's a real storehouse of information.
Some of it quite hair raising about the threat to our privacy created by the Web sites, apps and gadgets with which we constantly interact.
And the corporations and governments that use the personal data they collect.
Second, it offers a very compelling account of what is at stake,
what we stand to lose in a world in which there are systematic intrusions into our privacy,
in particular, Chris's analysis is really fruitful in highlighting two dimensions of the value of privacy.
The first is an individualistic dimension whereby privacy bears on some of our deepest interests,
for example, in intimate personal relations with others, or being able to think freely for ourselves.
And secondly, a public or collective dimension to privacy whereby it's a common good one that has an especially prominent role to play.
According to Charissa, in sustaining the possibility of an authentic, deliberative, participatory, democratic culture.
And thirdly,
the book goes beyond description and diagnosis and offers concrete prescriptions for how to improve privacy protection before it's too late.
Prescriptions regarding institutional and legal change, for example, banning personalised ads and the trade in personal data,
but also prescriptions regarding our own personal behaviour with respect to our privacy and the privacy of others.
We are very fortunate in having two commentators, two distinguished commentators, to discuss Chorus's book.
The first is Sir Michael Tickin Head, who is one of the leading British experts on the law of privacy.
He's also a philosophically minded lawyer whose books include Liberty Intact Human Rights in English Law, published by UPI in 2016.
And I understand that he is about to publish another book in French on unjustly the Collected Intellectuals,
a category in which most academics probably feel they belong.
So it should get a wide readership. Our second commentator is Stephanie Hare, a leading writer on technology policy.
Woman, journalist and broadcaster. And she is writing a book which should come out, I think, next year entitled Technology Ethics.
So thank you to both of them for coming today to discuss this important new book.
There will also be a Q&A session afterwards. So please, if you do have a question, it into the YouTube comment section.
But first, I'm going to ask Clarissa to give us her view of the main point and purpose of this great book that she's written.
Kristen, thank you so much, John. Thank you for your words. And thanks, everyone, for for being here, particularly John, Michael and Steph.
It's wonderful to have such good company to talk about these issues that worry me so much.
So maybe I would like to tell you a bit about how I came to this topic. I am six years ago.
I was deep in the archives of the Spanish Civil War researching my family history.
And I dug out many things that my grandparents had never told me, as was my mom.
And we started wondering whether we had a right to know these things. And I looked to philosophy for some answers and I felt unsatisfied.
And in that same summer that Edward Snowden came up with his revelations.
And I thought that was so important.
And I wasn't sure the philosophy or the world have the tools to think about the significance of these revelations and what they meant.
Eventually, that led me to write my dissertation on the ethics and politics of privacy.
And to read as much as I could about the topic. And with this book, Privacy is Power.
I wrote the book that I wish I had been able to read at the time. It's a book that's very concise.
It's short and it really goes to the point. I think we are at a crossroads.
It is urgent to fix our privacy landscape.
And so the first chapter goes through a person's day just to illustrate how much data we're losing by this point.
Everybody knows more or less that we're losing data. But do we know to what extent and exactly how it's being collected and how it's being used?
In many ways. It's very surprising.
Even privacy experts get surprised by some of the details because most of the practises that go on are very unknown to the public at large.
And even to privacy experts, because they're very experimental and companies typically don't advertise what they're doing.
Exactly. So I'll share a couple of examples just to give you a taste of the kind of thing that you might
find if you have a smart car when you drive your seat is actually recording your weight.
That information could be sold to insurance companies, to prospective employers.
Who knows? Another example is when you're going to a store and there's music in the background,
there might be audio beacons being transmitted that your phone picks up even though we can't hear them.
And that's to identify you as you and the same customer.
So that's if if the company wants to know that, you know,
you saw an ad in the morning on your laptop that you went to the store in your neighbourhood and you bought that product,
but you saw an ad for and the way they triangulate that data is through these audio becomes that can be broadcast at a music and TV.
And that we don't know about them. The book explains a bit how this came about.
It's just such a weird system that we have the data economy here are these this enormous industry that is earning so much money off of our data.
How did how did that happen? Who had that idea and how did it come about?
And it explains a bit how Google was a main protagonist in this story and how they really developed the whole concept of personalised ads and how
the data economy took off at a moment in which the United States government was considering regulating data along some of the lines of the GDP.
Has has implemented many, many years later. And then came 9/11.
And suddenly privacy wasn't that important anymore. And security really took the stage and our privacy legislation got shelved.
I mean, OK, now, when we have the situation and what does it mean, why is it important?
Many people have the idea that privacy is just a personal preference,
that if you're not very shy and you're not a criminal, you have nothing to fear, nothing to hide.
And so it's up to you whether you want to be careful or not. And the third chapter is really about how that conception is very misleading.
In fact, privacy should be a political concern. It's a collective matter.
It's really not a personal preference or an individual matter or much less so.
And I take this idea from the philosopher Bertrand Russell that we should think about power as energy.
One of the characteristics of energy is that it can transform from one thing into another.
And in the same way, power can transform from one type of power into another.
So there are three kinds of power that we're very familiar with in history, and that's economic power, political power, military power.
If you have enough money and the system doesn't work very well, you can buy votes.
You can buy politicians. Or you can. You can have an influence in politics in a way that shouldn't be allowed.
If you have enough politic political power, you can get yourself military power and so on.
And I argue that there's this fourth kind of power that kind of crept up on us.
And that's a power related to having too much personal data.
And it's a power that is related with having the ability to influence behaviour and predict the future.
So the reason why crept up on us,
because we thought that we would identify Monopoly's as long as there was a company that could increase their prices without losing customers.
And here we have companies that are free but are really charging their data or rather collecting our data from us in return and our attention.
And they can come up with very abusive policies and change them at will without even notifying us.
And we are losing consumers, but we didn't identify them as monopolies because it wasn't a matter of price in in the traditional sense.
So really, we should think about personal data as power. And if we give too much personal data to corporations, then the wealthy will rule.
If you give too much personal data to governments, we risk sliding into some form of authoritarianism.
And I argue that for democracy to be strong, we need to have control over our personal data as a collective, as a citizenry.
And one of the things I wrote in the book is how creepy data science can be.
Really? I mean, you have these data scientists who are creating kind of avatars of the population.
They have like a like a reality game of the population.
And they try things on these virtual zombies.
And whenever it works, then they try it on the real population. And you might think, well, you know, I'm an intelligent person.
I read, surely I won't be affected.
But when you are influencing millions and millions and millions of people, really, it doesn't take a lot of influence to be able to sway an election.
We have to think that in some elections are won and lost on the basis of a few hundreds or thousands of votes.
And to make that difference is it is isn't impossible.
In fact, Facebook published a study in Nature in 2010.
If I remember correctly, which it showed that just by showing ads to people to remind them to vote,
they could increase voter turn around by about four percent.
And that that could sway the election in itself. And the scary thing is that we don't know who Facebook shows these ads to.
There is no kind of auditing. And in fact, they have used this kind of I vote bots on in many elections without we.
We know that not everybody saw that. And we don't know what criteria Facebook used.
And with the coming elections now in the US, this is something outrageous that should really concern us because the rule of law
has to be more robust than just having trust that Facebook won't abuse their power.
So the gist is we've given too much data to corporations and they have too much power.
And what's special about this book is that it's the first one to really call for an end to the data economy.
I argue that personal data shouldn't be the kind of thing that can be bought and sold,
that we allow data brokers who are these companies that have files on every Internet user and then sell
amongst to other companies and governments that we allow them to profit from very sensitive information,
like whether somebody has been the victim of a rape or whether they have HIV or whether they suffer from all kinds of diseases.
It's just outrageous that that should never be. And even in the most capitalist of societies,
we agree that there are certain things that shouldn't be part of the market typically votes people the results of sports match matches.
And I think personal data should be in that category.
So one of the also one of the innovative parts of this book is that it suggests that personal data should be treated as a toxic asset.
And that suggests that we should think about it as something like asbestos.
It is poisoning individuals by making us vulnerable to harms like extortion, like data theft, like identity theft, like discrimination.
And it's poisoning societies by undermining equality. We're not being treated as equals.
We're being treated on the basis of our data and I don't undermine democracy.
So at the end, I have two chapters are very practical.
I'm a philosopher, but I also like to have one foot in the real world and to come up with solutions and proposals.
And one chapter is for policymakers. Amongst many of the measures I recommend are to ban all trades and personal data.
The second one is to ban all personalised content. We should be able to see the same thing as everybody else sees because otherwise our public
sphere will be fragmented and we won't be able to see the same opportunities to be offered,
the same opportunities. And we will, if we have access to information that is contradictory, is just gonna put us against each other.
And the third one is to implement fiduciary duties.
So fiduciary duties are duties that are implemented when there is a professional relationship in which there is an asymmetry.
So doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, financial advisor and clients are some examples in which there is an expert that can help you,
but who knows a lot more than you and who may have a conflict of interest.
So you can imagine that your doctor might be very interested in performing as a surgery on you to practise their skills.
Sorry. All your financial adviser might have an interest in selling your particular kind of stock.
And fiduciary duties are there so that in those kinds of cases, the interests of the client or the patient have to come first.
So I argue that whatever has anyone who wants to collect our data, then they have to accept fiduciary duties such that our data will always be used.
To help us, I'm never against us. And then finally, the last chapter is for ordinary citizens.
About what you can do to better protect your privacy and that of your family, your friends.
Because as I argue, privacy is collective. So if you expose yourself, you're really exposing others around you and others like you.
And even though you'll never get it perfect, you don't need to really it's a matter of making an effort and also expressing dissent.
One of the arguments that companies make when they have these outrageous practises is that people are consenting,
that they don't care about their privacy, that we're happy and to resist that is incredibly important.
First of all, it can actually protect you. But secondly, it creates statement and it leaves a data trail such that when regulators see that,
they can say, hey, look, now your customers weren't accepting wilfully. They were trying to say, I don't want my data collected and you violated that.
So I have lots of advice, really practical advice as to what kind of apps to use, what kind of practises to do.
And I hope that you will read the book, that you'll enjoy it and that you will tell me what you think.
Thank you so much, Chris, so that was really excellent and gave a really vivid sense of what the book is about.
So I'm now going to turn to the first of our commentators, and that is Michael to go ahead.
Michael. Hello. It's a privilege and a pleasure to be here.
What time round is the first event of the Institute for Ethics in Oxford?
This book is indeed a report, one I have enjoyed reading it, and it's easy to read.
It's in the tradition. It made me think of one of the most influential books written in the 20th century.
In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.
Carson exposed the dangerous side effects and unintended consequences of agricultural chemicals,
DDT helped to prevent the spread of malaria, which was a huge benefit to humanity, but it also had devastating effects on the environment.
There have been similar exposures of other products and services that have brought great benefits to the human race, but also great dangers.
For example, fossil fuels. That privacy is par is not a new idea.
One of the most important laws to protect privacy. It was ever passed was the laws that introduced a secret ballot in England.
That was in 1872. Before that, elections were decided by bribery and intimidation.
Landlords could intimidate tenants with threats of eviction and employers with threats of dismissal.
The secret ballot is privacy in the polling station.
Without it can't be any democracy. It's a very clear example of how privacy gives to the electorate.
That's all of us, the power that we wouldn't have if we were voting under the threats and bribes that existed before.
As Chris Wallace said, the opponents of privacy say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Some even say privacy is fraud, in other words.
They say you should not do say anything in private, but you would not do or say in public.
Curser exposes the fallacy of these arguments with crushing false.
For much of my career, first as a barrister and then as a judge,
I have been engaged in cases in which a balance has to be struck between rights that sometimes conflict.
For the publisher, for example, of a newspaper or the user of the Internet for blogging,
privacy may come or seem to come at the expense of freedom of expression for the state and for the citizen.
One person's privacy may come at the expense of other people's security.
But for the ordinary user of the Internet, his charisma shows. Privacy is necessary for freedom of expression and it is necessary for security to.
There are many topics that we need to discuss with our friends, our families, our employers and our colleagues.
We have advisors and other professionals, but we can only discuss these topics freely if we can discuss them in private.
Indeed, the fact that we are engaging in the discussion at all.
Could be a very private matter, let alone the contents of the discussion.
So two journalists and police officers insist on privacy, although they never used the word.
They do not disclose their sources or methods of work, if they did.
The sources would dry up and the methods might become unusable.
From my own experience, I know of the dangers to people's lives and security breaches of their privacy.
The invention of the smartphone with a camera has led to a plague of black men, intimidation and abuse.
Kiss and tell stories in the tabloids and revenge porn are examples in the past.
It was common for people's addresses to be listed in the telephone directory and nobody objected.
Today, for most people, that would be unthinkable. You can even have your address now removed from the electoral register.
And why? Of course, this is to protect people from all kinds of harassment, abuse and worse.
These are the dangers the cursor is seeking to publicise and with her suggested courses of action to remedy.
I have to say, I don't think a task will be an easy one. Agricultural chemicals and fossil fuels have also brought huge benefits to mankind.
They both help feed the world and fuel keeps us heated and mobile.
That is why they're still in use in spite of the damage that they do.
The bartering of personal data, which is what we are discussing tonight, is similarly a two sided invention.
The advantages which the Internet has brought us are obvious. That is why we click the consent button with little hesitation.
If you want to buy this book online, you will have to consent or perhaps you've already consented to the use of your data by the book shop.
And by others and look to the privacy policy on the Web sites, for example, the most honourable,
not for profit bodies such as Oxford University have kookie policies which are not consistent with Clarissa's recommendations.
Universities do not turn off the heating to save a few. And they do not abandon their kookie policies.
But something has to be done. The solution to the problem will come.
But it will only come if people are informed, as they will be if they read this book.
And if they have put the matter at the forefront of their concerns.
Two days ago, as it happens, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Max Hill, Queen's Counsel, made a speech.
It was entitled The Internet of Things is helping to provide key evidence in criminal trials.
That was also my experience as a judge in criminal trials.
I saw many horrific murder cases solved by the use of mobile phone metadata, DNA and other information available only from the Internet.
In those cases, it was hard to imagine how the crimes could have been solved in any other way.
There were no witnesses, no fingerprints. What Carissa has done is to highlight the price we pay for these enormous benefits.
It's a very unusual book. It is written by an Oxford philosopher.
But in spite of that, it can easily be read by anyone. This is no small achievement.
Some readers might find it surprising. They might even think that it's exaggerated.
But do not doubt what you read. I know from my own experience as a judge and as a barrister how much of what it contains is true.
It really is. And if you care about your freedom and security, I urge you to read it to.
Thank you. Thank you so much. So Michael and I can't emphasise enough how right you are.
What an achievement it is for academics to write accessibly. And this book certainly is a very accessible book.
So we're very lucky now to turn to our second commentator, Stephanie, here.
Stephanie, thank you very much. And that was.
A wonderful review by author Michael and I wanted to hold up the book just so we can look at it and celebrate it again.
This is such an achievement. I congratulate Charissa for writing something that is so accessible and I have many, many thoughts to share.
So I'm just going to dive right in. I would recommend this book to people who think they already know this topic,
of which I was one of those narcissistic people, and I found myself underlining pretty much on every page.
So as somebody who's the supposed experts, I learnt a lot and was challenged a lot by this book.
But I particularly think it will be a value to people who think they don't need this book.
Anyone who thinks that they have nothing to hide, nothing to fear, would really benefit from this book.
And also, I think younger people, because I think some of my assumptions of why I thought I didn't need to read this
book are because I lived through so much of what Caressa so ably summarises,
which is 9/11 and the changes that were brought about in the United States
by the Patriot Act and that history that she gives the contextualisation of.
Really, not just the surveillance capitalism model that Shaunessy Bob discusses in her book
and that Charissa does a very excellent job of bringing to our attention here,
but also the very genuine good intentions that I think a lot of liberal democracies
had in the wake of 9/11 and the power and promise of data to fight crime,
to fight terrorism. And we're seeing some of those arguments revisited today in a fight against a pandemic.
So I think having that historical context for people who are perhaps younger and
I'm thinking of all the people who might be wondering if they should read this,
if they're studying at university or even in high school or their parents or their teachers.
This is a really great introductory text that also is surprisingly useful for experts.
So you will hit so many different levels of knowledge and curiosity and assumption challenging with it.
It's great if you have if you don't have the scars of the 2016 U.S. election and Brexit referendum, if you don't have the scars of 9/11,
if you don't have the scars of finding out how your data that you were perhaps hitting with very good faith onto the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s.
This is a nice review for why some of us are so, so concerned about this.
And for those of us who have lived through it, as I say, there's still quite a lot in there that is really new.
I like this idea, this question of is data something we should be thinking about as a question of ownership or as a human rights?
And again, Charissa really brings that question to the surface, because you start thinking, why do all of these data brokers have all of our data?
I don't transact. You don't transact ever directly with the data broker.
Yet they are able to buy and sell our data and we can't stop them from doing it.
We're powerless to do it. And even with all of the very wonderful tips at the end of this book,
in the last two chapters in particular about what we can do on an individual level,
there is no stopping Equifax, which is one of the big data brokers in the United States.
As an individual American, or indeed many non Americans who were not based in the United States were U.S. citizens,
but who still had their data taken because Equifax failed to protect it and the US Congress did nothing right.
Had a hearing that that was it. So I think one of the things that you find is you might wanna read this book
with a stressful because you'll read it and you will find yourself thinking,
why are our elected representatives doing so little to protect us?
What do we need to do about that? So there's a really nice tension in this book between what you can do as an individual, how it isn't just about you,
it's about everyone in your network, and indeed just the society and tone that we're creating about data and privacy.
And then there's a sort of there's a limitation to that at a certain point.
Are regulators and lawmakers need to be doing a better job.
And the perennial complaint of regulators is they never feel they have enough staff and they never feel they have enough money.
Right. So they don't have the resources to do the job they need to take on these very big companies who have.
Bottomless pits of money and all the lawyers they can hire. So the question we have to ask and we might have to get awkward about this is, well, what?
What is enough money for regulator today?
What do what does the ICAO here in the United Kingdom information commissioner's office need to be able to truly take on a Facebook?
All right. Because there's all sorts of companies getting away with murder in this country and the ICAO can only do so much.
And all of our lawmakers, who I also hope will read this book and I hope that they all get a copy of it if they don't buy it themselves.
I need to ask themselves, what are they doing by not taking action?
And one of the things that I would love to hear in the discussion that we do later after my remarks is to
discuss the role of the GDP are the general data protection regulation and what CARECEN thinks about it?
Is it is it enough? Is it just a start? How is it influencing our thinking about data protection around the world?
There was a really great assessment that was just published today about California's Data Protection Act,
which takes a lot of inspiration from here in Europe. And just your thoughts on that.
As a philosopher, I think would be absolutely fascinating to hear.
There was discussion in the book, I think, but don't quote me on it.
I'd love to ask about whether or not you think we need to ban facial recognition technology.
And if so, in what uses. So are we talking about using it to unlock my phone,
ban that using it at work or using it out in public or the use of it for law enforcement, et cetera?
This concept of consent and there was an article I remember a few years ago called Putting the Con in Consent, which is that it's a joke.
We're being asked to violate our own privacy repeatedly over and over again.
And that you can't really use a smartphone or go on the Internet without being asked to violate your own privacy.
And I've noticed I was really good on finding a lot of this.
And frankly, since the pandemic, I'm just so psychologically tapped that I just find myself often consenting to things because I'm on the Internet.
So much for my work that I would be asked to consent, which is set my privacy settings,
you know, hundreds of times a day, which is just not realistic. And that's what I mean about the model of consent is so flawed.
It doesn't work on an individual level. It's not working in aggregate. Is your book so aptly?
Aptly points out. And so the question becomes, well, then how do we fix it?
And that's more than an individual engineer can fix. It's more than one country can fix.
This is something we're going to have to really get thorny with.
You raise some excellent points about democracy,
a question that is close to my heart at the moment with what's coming in the United States in just a few weeks time.
And again, this this question of not just being manipulated by ads, because I think a lot of people have pushed back on that argument saying,
I know very well when I think about my politics and I'm not you know, it wasn't Cambridge Analytica that made me vote one way or another or not vote.
And we can argue that point or not.
But I think the point that you raised in the book that's so important is, is it just about undermining confidence in the entire process?
And who's getting access to our data? And the really not a question that we must ask of.
Is it simply Russia? That's interfering in elections?
Or do liberal democracies, which have had a history of interfering in elections elsewhere around the world?
Do we ever do that? And do companies based in liberal democracies allow that to happen?
And is that an underexploited area? So you raised some some points that I thought were so provocative.
And the biggest one, the one I will end on is that for so long,
people have put a tension between privacy and security and said you have to sacrifice one or the other,
and that if we allow everybody to be private online, then all the criminals and terrorists can run around and do what they want.
So we have to sacrifice our privacy of open everything up and then we can have greater security because law enforcement can do their job.
That's been a really long argument. We'll call that sort of post 9/11 argument.
But you make a different argument. I think.
And it's a compelling one, which is that actually privacy enhances personal security and privacy enhances collective security.
And I personally am very much of that argument and would agree with you.
And then the counter argument that I now find myself arguing against in my own
head and hope to argue all of you arguing in the fun and philosophical sense,
not in the antagonistic sense, is that we need data in this pandemic.
We need to really granular data. We need data about people's contacts to do contact tracing.
Whether it's with a human contact tracing team, which is really privacy invasive or an app or a wearable device like we're seeing in Singapore,
we need public health authorities to be able to know when a cluster has has been identified.
We need to be identifying super spreader events so that we can stop them.
And we also need to see if it's certain people who are spreading this disease more than others, because as we're learning more and more about it,
we're starting to find out that it seems to be only a small percentage of the population that's spreading it a lot.
And that might be part of having to do the virus response management, according to public health authorities, which, if you are into privacy,
is such a challenge because you're thinking about things not just for your own personal health or that of your family.
You're also thinking about it collectively, which is that the sooner we can get out of this mess, the better for all of us.
So I love that privacy versus security. Privacy is security.
And then pandemic addition, which I would just call WCF.
I don't know, I don't have the answers to it, but I loved I loved the way that your book made me think.
And I love how accessible it is to beginners, too.
So so-called experts. So thank you so much. Thank you, Stephanie.
That was fantastic. Look, that's a very rich array of comments that Charissa.
And it would be unfair to get you to sort of respond to all the interesting issues that were raised there.
But is there anything in particular? A couple of points you'd like to address the Rysiek?
Those two sets of comments? Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for those very insightful comments.
Maybe one thing to address that I think is in everybody's mind is whether this is realistic.
Is it realistic to call for an end to the data economy?
And of course, if we look for reasons for pessimism in history and human nature, it's not difficult to find them.
They're everywhere, you know, screaming at us every day. Like, ecology is a big one.
But there is one reason that I think.
Gives us a reason to be optimistic, and that is we have skin in the game individually in a way that inequality is less obvious.
Many people think, well, you know, I won't be here by the time, you know, the earth roasts.
But with privacy, it's becoming more and more obvious how people are at risk.
So in a recent survey that I carried out with Sambrook from Oxford,
we found out that about 92 percent of people have had some kind of bad experience related to privacy online.
Sometimes it's identity theft. Sometimes it is public humiliation, doxing all kinds of bad experiences.
And that really makes people realise the risk that they're engaging in when when they give up their privacy in a way that we don't realise that yet.
That immediately about ecology.
And also, even though privacy is collective, there is also this individual site in which hopefully that can motivate people to act.
And there are some examples of people overcoming barriers and coming together and organising and being very successful.
The one I gave in the book, but there are others is the ozone layer.
You know, a few decades ago, it was really a really bad shape. We came together, we realised this.
We banned CFC. And today it's recovering and it will completely recover in a few years.
So that is an incredible success story and an example of the things that we can do when when we put our minds to it.
But there are others. If you think about child labour, at some point it was unimaginable for it to go away.
And yet we we change things and we change rules.
And even though today, particularly in the context of the pandemic, the digital economy seems so entrenched.
We should bear in mind that it's really very new and there is still a lot to be digitised and that this is very brand new and there's a lot of I mean,
a lot of opportunity to change it in time about the GDP.
I think that that's also probably people are wondering about that. I think it was a magnificent thing, you know, three years before it happened.
Nobody thought it was even possible. Everybody just laughed. And that it came to be was an incredible achievement.
And it really put privacy in the minds of so many people. And it made companies have to change so many things and deal better with data
and think about it and realise that personal data is a liability for companies.
So in a way, it's it's wonderful. No, it's not enough. Not nearly enough.
We need to go way beyond that. One of the main problems is, as Stephanie said, that it feels it's it's based on consent.
And that doesn't make any sense for many reasons. One, it's too burdensome for the individual, too.
There's no way of informed consent when you don't know what kind of inferences can be made from the data.
I'm not even data scientists can know. So when we speak about consent, how are you consenting if you have no idea what you're consenting to?
And third, because personal data is collected in this way, it's not okay for you to consent to give your data when your data includes data about me.
So when my family gives up their digital genetic data, they're giving their genetic data up me.
They're their siblings. Their parents are kids.
And so we don't have the moral authority to consent to personal data being collected in the way that we have
more authority to consent to what's being done to our bodies in the context of matters in for instance.
Regarding the question that Stephanie mentioned about whether liberal democracies also interfere in elections in other places in the world,
I think that is indeed an honour. That's something that's understudied and that we should pay more attention to.
We know that there are many data firms out there similar to Cambridge Analytica.
Hundreds of them. And we should really be looking at what they do exactly and whether it's OK.
And then finally, this argue the post 9/11 argument in the context of coalbed.
I think that it is a false dichotomy to think that we have to choose between security and privacy.
And in fact, when we sacrifice privacy, we sacrifice security.
And one example is because the Internet, the Internet is very insecure and it's very insecure, insecure to allow for data collection.
It's kind of conscience. A conscious decision, but making the Internet so insecure means that we are all at risk.
So if hackers hacked even just 10 percent of electrical appliances in a country,
they could bring the electrical grid down and that would put the country on its knees.
So it's it's that's risky to have but privacy practises.
And with regards to the coronavirus pandemic, of course, of course, there is a debate to have.
And in some cases, you do need to give up privacy in order to get some benefits.
I mean, obviously, when you go to the doctor, if you don't tell them what's wrong with you. You're not gonna get the care that you need.
But at the same time, I think that because it's such a sexy debate, it distracts from the main point that we need medical solutions.
You know, we need a good testing system, which we don't have.
We have mass testing and we need protective equipment for the right people.
And we need social distancing and we need medicines and we need a vaccine. And these are the medical requirements that will make the pandemic go away.
And no app can substitute for that.
And I worry that too much, too 20 times the debates kind of get distracted by these finer points, whereas the main thing is not being addressed.
Great. Let me raise some questions that have come through from our audience that actually relate to some of the points you've made,
so I'm just going to mention two of them that distinct, but I think they relate to what you discussed.
So you began with some optimism that we can bring an end to the data economy, the personal data economy.
This is a question from Tristan Gertz who says,
How can we dismantle this economy given the huge and pervasive power of big tech in all aspects of life, including our personal lives?
So that's the first thing. I mean, I think also about the way in which, for example, they can buy political influence,
especially in America with lax camp campaign financing laws and so forth.
So apart from appealing to historical analogies, what's the concrete way this is going to happen?
Second question was Maximilien Kina, which is he says if privacy is a collective good.
How significant can individual consent be? Now, I want to riff on this a little bit,
because I think one of the most original things about your book is that normally when we think about privacy, we think about the right to privacy.
And that means that my personal information is protected.
You have duties not to pry into it, not to use it in certain ways.
But in addition to talking about a right to privacy, you seem to be talking as well that we have duties of non-disclosure.
I think this is really interesting. So you say we want to create a culture of restraint.
You say we want to create. You say that a culture of exposure where we voluntarily expose information damages society.
And you say things like that. People shouldn't be able, I think.
I think you say they shouldn't be able to go and buy direct to consumer DNA test and publish that size these results,
because if they do, then they're in a sense exposing information also about other people.
So I think this kind of raises an issue that Michael kind of approaches, which is balancing the rights.
Someone might say, well, look, your your imposing such heavy duties of non-disclosure,
of not being able to do a DNA test and so forth, you're actually constricting my liberty.
So how do we draw the line between the liberties that I have even to do wrong, even to engage in forms of exposure that are not good?
And how so? How do we make proper regard to privacy compatible with.
Regard for the liberty of the person. Excellent questions.
So how do we change this? We've changed this mainly through public pressure.
When regulators and companies realise that people are really sick and tired of it and we're not
going to collaborate anymore and we're not going to cooperate to the best of our abilities.
Things will change. It's amazing how sensitive governments and companies are to people sentiments.
And you might think that nobody cares. But they're actually monitoring.
All of these companies are monitoring social media to see what people think of their products.
And one of the examples I gave is how Google Glass didn't take off because everybody thought it was so creepy.
And people who started using it were called glass holes that very soon it just disappeared.
And we can do the same with this. Furthermore, I have the hope that companies realise that privacy can be a competitive advantage when people want it.
It can sell. And so if a big company starts giving much, much better services with privacy and people start choosing it,
other companies will follow and they will up their game. So I think it will be effortful and it's going to take some time.
But the sentence, I can't take that much time, if you will really start behaving in this way and start expressing their dissent.
It could change quite quickly, just like the GDP came into effect in like a matter of few years,
five years, when before that everybody thought it was absolutely and completely impossible.
Never going to happen. Privacy's then. So I think we should be more optimistic and I think I really think that tech wants us to be pessimistic.
They want us to see them as these giants who will be here forever and that, you know, we can't possibly change.
But in fact, they're quite dependent on us. So it's good to have one in mind with regard to the collective part of privacy.
Yes, I do think we have duties. To protect our privacy, both for ourselves.
For the people around us and for our society in general. I wouldn't want those duties to be implemented in law to a very strict degree.
So I don't I don't argue that people shouldn't be able to do a genetic test.
I think that, you know, you should think about it.
And if you don't need it for medical reasons, you should be aware that you're putting other people at risk and that,
you know, 40 percent of these results are false. And like, you know, is this worth it?
And here, I think a lot depends on culture.
Currently, we have a culture of exposure in which there is a lot of pressure to expose yourself.
You have to say what you think about an issue at all times. People just assume that if they take a picture of you.
They can upload it to wherever they want and tag you and these kinds of things.
And already I think it's changing. When I started working in this area, whenever I talked about this with people, they were kind of surprised.
And more and more either I must before I need to ask permission to upload my my photo or when I do.
People are completely apathetic about it and interested. And it's it's much, much easier.
So I think it's already changing and we're more aware of the risks online as we become more savvy online.
And here I think we should. We should think about the analogy with with medical ethics.
So there are a few things in medical ethics in which even if people consent, you can't do.
So one is like very extreme bad medical practises that even even if only the individual gets harmed.
So if you go to the hospital and you tell the doctor, hey, I want you to infect me with this disease just because,
you know, I want to try it out, I want experience that in my own flesh. This is interesting to me.
Even if the patient would agree and the doctor would agree, that's that's illegal, that you can't do that.
I mean, the same way for public health purposes. There are certain things in the context of the pandemic you can do.
So you can't, you know, are singing a choir without any mask, you in an enclosed space, et cetera, et cetera.
So in the same mind that we don't allow certain very, very bad practises to happen in medicine, we shouldn't allow very,
very bad practises to happen with regards to personal data,
even if people were to consent because society has an interest that we are protected in these ways.
And I think this doesn't need to be extremely stringent. So you don't need to feel like your liberty is is being limited,
just as you generally don't feel that your liberty is being limited because you're
not allowed to go to a doctor and ask them to infected with a deadly disease.
Okay, let me ask you something about you say a culture.
So there was one question from Ross Jones who says, look, this cultural variation in the importance people attach to various aspects of privacy.
The book is very hostile to personalised ads. You say one point they have to stop.
Page 26. Ross Jones says that in China, people have a more favourable attitude towards personalised ads.
So, you know, number one. What's wrong with personalised ads?
And number two, might there be legitimate cross-cultural variation in how we regulate things like personal instance?
Personalised us. Don't seem too bad on the surface, they seem like, OK.
So. Companies get to sell the products and you get to see ads that are relevant to you.
Everybody wins. But the cost is not a parent. If that were the whole deal, then I would be totally in favour of personalised Strads.
But the risk is so high and the disadvantages are so high that the benefit might not be worth it.
And the cost is that people will misuse that data to target people in ways that are very unfair,
either because they're going to target them for their vulnerabilities. So you identify who is that, a veteran,
and then you sell them payday loans that are going to put them in a very bad position or because the data is going to be used
to target political propaganda that is going to inflame the population and is going to pit what people against each other.
And one of the things that we don't realise is that we don't have. UNmediated access to reality.
Most of what we know about the world, we know through our screens.
And so when you think that, you know, I won't be influenced because I don't believe ads.
Everything you watch online is part of it makes a picture of the world.
And if your picture of the world is completely different from your neighbour because you don't see the same content,
it's very hard to have a peaceful and harmonious society and relationship with a person or with those people.
So the cost is too high. Regarding cultural differences, I think they have been exaggerated.
A lot. And it's it's more of a myth than a reality than that people in Eastern cultures don't care about privacy.
And one really good example has been China precisely during the pandemic.
It's been very interesting to see how people are starting to rebel against this level of intrusion by speaking more to newspapers,
by talking amongst themselves. And there has been much more repression from the Chinese government clashing down
on the on these conversations about privacy and these concerns about privacy.
So even though there might be a culture of variation, the reasons why we care about privacy,
the interest we have in privacy being protected are the same for all human beings because nobody wants to be abused and nobody wants to be at risk of,
you know, identity theft or physical. You don't want your physical security compromised.
You want to be able to vote in a way that is free of pressures. And these kind of very primal interests are pretty common across cultures.
Let me ask one question and hopefully Michael and Stephanie also could give their views about this.
So, you know, we've already talked about the potential tension between protection of privacy and freedom of speech.
The one area with freedom of speech seems to be particularly important is political speech.
Now, you say something in respect to targeted sort of microtargeting political ads.
I think in the Cambridge analytical context, you say this on page two, 107,
discouraging people who might vote for the candidate who is not your client from going to vote is thwarting democracy.
So I'm calling democracy. If I discourage people from voting for the client, who is the candidate who is not my client, but someone would say,
but that's the essence of political campaigning,
that I'm trying to discourage people to vote for Trump or whoever it is that I want people to vote for.
So there's a kind of one might think you're kind of worrying feature there that, you know, someone's gonna have to decide what propaganda is.
And this is going to be something that we have to somehow ban. Isn't it better just to recognise that people will come forward with different views?
And as long as people have access to different views, they can make up their minds.
But it's it's of the essence of political speech to encourage people to vote for one person or at least discourage them from voting somewhere else.
I reread that page and maybe edited to be increasingly clear.
What I was referring to is that is voter suppression. So to discourage people from voting and the people who you discourage from voting are
only the people who would vote for the candidate that you don't want them to vote for.
That is why they start thwarting democracy. Can I ask also Michael and Stephanie what their thoughts are on this and in particular?
It's an issue that Carissa raises quite powerfully,
which is that she says personalised ads fracture the public sphere into individual parallel realities.
And that this undermines the kind of deliberation and solidarity needed for just serious Democratic decision making.
Any thoughts on this? I certainly agree that there's a strong point there.
The question is how how far does it go? And I think Chris's project is a realistic one in the long term, not in the short term, but in the long term.
And that is the result of public discussion. That will be a solution, but it isn't a political speech at the moment.
The only sort of information which is is not permissible for this to use to
influence voters is false information about the personal character of a candidate.
Even that is difficult to define and is not a provision to which which is commonly used.
So, yes, there must be other forms of interference with elections,
such as giving false information as to whether it's safe to go to the polling booth.
That could be very destructive indeed. And there's plenty of other sorts of information as well.
So I I'm quite certain that Chris has told us, particularly me, a great deal, but I didn't know before.
And what's not important is that the debate has started and we'll be able to address these issues.
One of the things that I was thinking about as we were just discussing this was that in some countries it's a requirement to vote.
And in others, it is not a problem in states where it is not a requirement.
And lots of people don't vote. And I believe Australia it is. And that made me wonder if that might be a way of, first of all, removing.
And we had seen sort of innervates you could remove this whole question of disenfranchising voters by saying voting is now legal requirements.
You have to vote. But I would once, if we were to do that, to have a none of the above option so that you're not being,
again, forced to kind of violate your own consent. I don't want to be forced to say that I want any of these people.
I would love a none of the above option as well so that we could have that option of my body for Trump and my body for Biden or neither.
So that that's recorded. Right, because that's the choice and that will give us more accurate data.
So I thought about Nas just as you were covered. You do have that.
You can spoil your ballot paper. You will. But you never know if they've done it by accident or not.
I want them to know I will. I would love to be able to count that.
But I also thought about this point. You write it so beautifully in your book.
Each of us lives in a different reality on page one of seven. And that made me sort of think.
I was trying to argue against these things a lot in my mind because I was agreeing with you so much.
Thank you. Isn't that true? Don't we all live in our own reality?
And that's a big thing with this pandemic, because at the beginning, everyone was saying,
oh, you know, we're all in the same boat, Ralph, facing the same threat. There was a little almost bizarre kumbayah, at least on Twitter.
I just was like, what the hell are you people talking about there? There are people who are out in their garden.
I can see them. They're my neighbours. They have a garden. I do not. Right. So just an example right there.
They've been barbecuing and having people over.
And if you have little kids versus teenagers versus if you're living on your own, you're having a totally different pandemic.
If you're six months furloughed at 80 percent of your salary versus you've lost all your work,
if you aren't any just doctor and you're working double time wearing bin bags because there's no PPE for you.
You are having a different pandemic than me who is able to hold up and complain in my
flat about being isolated while my friends were going to hospital and risk their lives.
And it just made me think of this these different realities.
And what I love is how you articulate this in your book, that this is where lawmakers and regulation are going to have a role to play.
That maybe we have to agree some rules here for the social media age with regards to elections.
And that made me think of France and how France has a rule that in the run up to an election, at a certain point, political advertising has to stop.
I mean,
I think I can speak for all Americans who say that they would love to see a ban on all political ads because they get so blasted and it starts,
you know, a year up until it. But can you imagine how peaceful and harmonious people's lives and relationships
would be if there was a sort of two week hiatus in the run up to the election?
Was it's done just silence. Everybody said what they have to say. In the context of the book,
I think the greater point is that we need to have these things public because if somebody is
suppressing votes but we can't see it because only the person being targeted and the company sees them,
then that's a problem. If we have ads being completely public and everybody can see the same thing, then academics can criticise them.
Journalists can fact cheque them. We can have the public debate if we don't know what's going on.
If we don't have what are called dark ads, then we can't have that kind of public debate.
We can make a decision about what we want our society to look like. This has been a fascinating debate.
I hope everyone who's joined us has enjoyed it as much as I have.
I think all that's really left is to say thank you to Karissa for writing this excellent book and for discussing it with us today.
Thank you also to our two distinguished commentators, Stephanie here.
And so, Michael, chicken hat.
Our next event, I should mention, is going to be on October 15th at the same time where we'll be discussing, I'm sorry, six o'clock,
not the same time, six o'clock, where we'll be discussing algorithms, the ethics of algorithms with Cass Sunstein of Harvard University.
But thank you, everyone, for watching, Miss. That's a different screen.