The Latest Facebook Controversy Shows There Is NO Expectation of Privacy in the Digital World

I've been blogging about one Facebook controversy or another since 2011 - but there's actually hundreds or even thousands of companies mining and using your data. This article addresses the issue of harvesting and using online data - from your Facebook posts to friends and family to that smile you had watching your favorite TV show.

The latest Facebook controversy comes as they admit that companies routinely harvest Facebook user data including user data harvested by Cambridge Analytica. The latest controversy came to light after 28-year-old whistleblower Christopher Wylie, went on-record to reveal how the company used Facebook profile data of more than 50 million people to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. No matter what your position we all must realize that our attention has value – otherwise companies would not pay for it. Whether you’re getting frequent flyer points on your credit card, discounts at your supermarket or “free software upgrades” your information is being used to more carefully craft the advertising delivered to you. Once again, in the end that old cliché is proven true; “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.

Facebook has frustrated members more than once with its excessively complicated privacy policies and unwanted privacy surprises nestled in its terms of service. Facebook has tried to walk a tightrope between offering users a private space to connect with their family and friends while still feeding businesses as much user data as they can in order to serve them effective advertising. Since I've been watching and writing about this, it would appear that, the balance tips more often in the favor of business rather than user privacy. The Federal Trade Commission even slapped the company on the wrist with regular privacy audits for 20 years because it “deceived consumers” [1] with its privacy promises.

We all very familiar with the value of our money and our time but the value of our attention is less explored and understood. Even so, monetizing our attention has created a vast treasure for those elite few who have developed methods to aggregate and analyze attention. The internet has created new opportunities for companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple to aggregate and grow fat on the data they gather about what gets and keeps our attention; our on line behavior, our friends and family, each internet search, every on line transaction, even emails to deliver targeted advertising or better search results.

Thales Teixeira, a Harvard Business professor tried to calculate the value of our attention, and reported that, like all other fungible commodities, its price fluctuates. Using Super Bowl ads as a rough indicator of the high end of the market, he determined that in 2010 the price of an American’s attention was six cents per minute[2]. In the last half-decade this has already increased by seven to nine fold. The big jump in value has obvious implications: attention is becoming increasingly scarce and therefore valuable, as people spend their free time distracted by a growing array of attention grabbing devices and being tracked by an ever increasing assortment of analytical tools.

In his 2013 book, Who Owns the Future[3], Jeron Lanier[4] also posits that our attention has very real and tangible monetary value, and companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have used the internet to aggregate and use the value our collective attention to create their fortunes. He likens these businesses to exploiters of the “peasant class” and claims that, “users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are”. He predicts that, when “ordinary people ‘share,’ while an elite network uses that sharing to generate unprecedented fortunes,” that even the elite will eventually be undermined by their own strategies. 

“Attention is the hard currency of cyberspace,” authors Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun artfully predicted in their 1996 book, “The Rules of the Net”[5]. This may be the earliest recognition that the developing digital economy would come to be driven by new forms of targeted advertising based on user data and preferences. We all know that Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking and personal data aggregation sites that collect vast amounts of user data use that data to sell on line advertising. Just this week Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, announced plans to open users’ feeds to more advertisers[6]. The dirty secret of this business model is that Internet ads aren’t worth much unless they can be precisely targeted – and more precise targeting means higher advertising revenues. A recent New York Times article[7] pointed this out a different way, claiming that “The most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network so much as the creation of a tool that convinced hundreds of millions of people to hand over so much personal data for so little in return.”

Even as these societal and behavioral changes continue to expand, new and increasingly sophisticated technologies and business models are emerging to take further advantage of our on line information - if a company like Cambridge Analytica can weaponize user data effectively enough to swing votes what else might be happening without our even knowing it? For example, a new field called “affective computing”, has begun to combine aspects of emotional reasoning to help create true machine intelligence. Ad analytics company, Sizmek for example, uses over 300 billion data points every day to predict who will buy what, when, and at what price. They use their data to help companies reduce the costs of acquiring customers by buying the most effective ads - targeting, re-marketing and costs are all optimized.

As you might expect, the first companies to take advantage of these new affective analytics are those who want to sell us more products. Tools that can analyze micro-expressions to determine emotional reactions that show up on our face, can be used to target advertising or even dynamically price products based on our emotional reactions. What started as an exercise to evaluate individual emotional responses to advertising or movie scenes, has blossomed into a dystopian nightmare of new ways to manipulate emotions and behavior on a massive scale.

Before you think I’m just another luddite, consider this; as I researched this article I found dozens of patents for emotion-sensing technologies from facial recognition to temperature sensing or other sensor data – almost all of them tied to advertising or, more effectively monetizing our attention. One of our local Utah companies makes a chip set that now is installed into televisions that serves up advertising based on the viewing habits of the watcher. They plan to monetize the capability by dynamically serving up ads based on a rich soup of user data and analytics. This is just one more step on the road of a massive change in how advertising gets priced - and ultimately many firms hope to land on ad pricing based on actual sales.

The companies represented included many you would expect – Google, Twitter, eBay, I.B.M., Yahoo!, and Motorola - and hundreds of other lesser known rivals. It also included many you might not expect - Sony researchers anticipate games that build “emotional maps” of players, combining data from sensors and from social media to create new and novel gaming interactivity. Anheuser-Busch has designed and patented a “responsive beer bottle” (though I cannot imagine what the use might be – maybe it cheers for your team).

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[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/facebook-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-failing-keep

[2] The Rising Cost of Consumer Attention: Why You Should Care, and What You Can Do About It. Thales S. Teixeira; Harvard Business School. January 2014

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979

[4] https://www.jaronlanier.com/

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Net-Online-Operating-Instructions/dp/0786881356

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/technology/instagram-to-announce-plans-to-expand-advertising.html

[7] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/facebook-should-pay-all-of-us?mbid=social_facebook