The real frightening questions to ask about privacy and COVID tracking Apps
Tommaso Buganza
Professor of Leadership&Innovation @Politecnico di Milano | Co-founder LEADIN' Lab | Thinkers50 Radar 2024 | Director of Platform Thinking HUB Observatory | Co-author of Platform Thinking-READ the past, WRITE the future
By Tommaso Buganza and Daniel Trabucchi
We are living in an unprecedented situation. The global pandemic shown in many Hollywood movies is now a reality and – without popcorns– it looks quite different.
In Italy – as hopefully will soon happen in other countries – the rate of diffusion started finally to decrease. The discussion is now moving to the management of "Phase 2". What will “the new normal” look like? What will it be like to live in a world in which the virus is under control, but still present?
Digital experts are proposing possible "futuristic scenarios" in which mobile applications will track us to immediately inform potentially exposed people and interrupt the transmission chain (see, for example, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project). Meanwhile, Google is already sharing anonymous data to identify people who are breaking the lockdown (Giuffrida, 2020; Hamilton, 2020) and partnered up with Apple to develop a contact tracing technology (Apple, 2020). At the same time, the world is starting to look ahead, asking "how" – since "if" is no longer an option– this global emergency will change our lives in the years to come. In an article recently published on the Financial Times, Yuval Harari describes the possible downsides of using available technologies to track people movements and behaviors. On the one hand this would help the sustainability of the national health-care systems, but, on the other hand, the cost could be a “new normal” where our vital functions are constantly measured, stored and analyzed. It is easy to imagine how this huge data base, along with the increasing knowledge about human biomechanics and the impressive advancement of AI, might lead to a reduction of democracy and civil rights in our countries (Harari, 2020).
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Humans look frightened, not only by the pandemic but also by the loss of privacy (Brody and Nix, 2020). Are we slowly but inexorably losing our freedom?
But what do we already know about data? Data is the new oil, being considered a precious resource to be exploited. Data is valuable because they allow us to understand things that we wouldn't otherwise. They show us something we don't know, both as individuals and as a community. They show us things that are there, but that are too complicated for individual human brains to see.
Think about Netflix, one of the services many of us enjoy most in these lockdown days. Choosing a new movie, or a new series is an epic adventure. That's true. But you might not know that Netflix already made it a lot easier for you. Probably you noticed that the "match score" (the percentage indicating how likely you should appreciate the content) is often very high. That’s because Netflix tracks all your behaviors, previous shows, frequency of watching and then, leveraging AI, proposes you only movies and series you should like. You can try a little experiment if curios. Search the whole catalog, you will discover many more contents…and probably don’t like them!
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash
This is just one example of services that many of us use everyday…but the list is long. Spotify can suggest songs, Amazon products, our fitness app –Runkeeper, Runtastic, Freeletics… the next training session optimized using the data we provided through previous ones.
This may sound like something unique of the app economy, but it's not. Google built its empire on a data-driven business model, targeting ads on the search engine, using players to tag images (with the game Google Image Labeler) and captcha to detect addresses (Perez, 2012) or street view images…possibly to help self-driving cars (Kid, 2019). Even Starbucks – a brick and mortar company - uses the data from its mobile app to get insights on their customers’ habits and tastes (Gallea-Pace, 2020).
We all know these stories but now, all of a sudden, we find ourselves more fearful and privacy sensitive. We are afraid of the impact that technology may have on our lives, but we fail (again) in recognizing that this already happened.
Major digital companies know us perfectly, they know a lot more about us than we imagine. And some of them, over the years, became extremely good in profiting and capturing value from data (Trabucchi et al., 2017, 2018).
They "pay" us back with more personalized services or, in some cases, with free services…which we like even more.
Companies – of course – must respect all privacy laws, and GDPR in Europe has played a huge role in this. However, companies can do a lot with the data we provide them because we accept the terms of use… usually without reading them.
Curiously, this isn’t even the first time that the privacy issue violently explodes. Two years ago, all the social media of the world were filled with the #LeaveFacebook movement.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted Facebook's data-based business model and its implications for our privacy, and even the impact that data can have on our lives through micro-targeting and similar phenomena (Cadwalladr, 2019). In those days, it seemed like the world realized what had been there for years: data is valuable, companies use it. Looking at Mark Zuckerberg wearing a suit and tie in front of the US Congress, many of us thought that Facebook would become as empty as our cities are today. The reality is that it didn’t happen. After the clamor, we went back to our habits… we enjoy our free digital services too much to bother considering we actually pay them with our data currency.
And here we are again. In this unique historical moment, we think a lot about how the “new normal” will be like. If we really care about our privacy, we should ask ourselves: will our near future be different only in terms of social relationships and physical movement or will it also put into discussion our well-established digital life?
We can still get our privacy back… if we want.
But, are we ready to give up those wonderful services provided by Netflix, Waze, Amazon, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and all the others?
So, this is our point: is this sudden upheaval around privacy connected to the use of personal data to protect public health really justified? Perhaps we should rather accept that the “new normal” is posing even more frightening questions.
Do we value free services more than public health?
Do we trust private companies more than our governments?
Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash
References
Apple, (2020). Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology. Apple Newsoroom. April 10th, 2020. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/
Brody, B. and Nix, N. (2020). Pandemic Data-Sharing Puts New Pressure on Privacy Protections. Bloomberg. April 5th, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-05/pandemic-data-sharing-puts-new-pressure-on-privacy-protections
Cadwalladr, C. (2019). My Ted talk: how I took on the tech titans in their lair. The Guardian. April 21st, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/21/carole-cadwalladr-ted-tech-google-facebook-zuckerberg-silicon-valley
Gallea-Pace, S. (2020). How is big data transforming the supply chain? Digital Supply Chain. https://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=scd_feb2020&pageLayout=doublePage&u=supplychaindigital&p=72
Giuffrida, F. (2020). Google pubblica spostamenti e luoghi affollati: le mappe online per combattere il Coronavirus. OpenOnline. April 3rd, 2020. https://www.open.online/2020/04/03/google-pubblica-spostamenti-luoghi-affollati-mappe-online-combattere-coronavirus/
Hamilton, I. (2020). Fascinating Google data from 131 countries shows where people go amid lockdowns — with park and grocery visits plummeting as much as 90%. Business Insider. April 3rd, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-releases-lockdown-movement-location-data-2020-4?IR=T
Harari, Y. (2020). The world after Coronavirus. Financial Times. March 20th, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75
Kid, K. (2019). Here’s Why CAPTCHA Shows You Traffic Pictures. The Newsweheel. Marxh, 19th, 2019. https://thenewswheel.com/captcha-self-driving-cars/
Pan-European Privacy-Preservin Proximity Tracing project - https://www.pepp-pt.org
Perez, S. (2012). Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses. TechCrunch. March 29th, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/
Trabucchi, D., Buganza, T., & Pellizzoni, E. (2017). Give Away Your Digital Services: Leveraging Big Data to Capture Value. Research-Technology Management, 60(2), 43-52. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08956308.2017.1276390
Trabucchi, D., Buganza, T., Dell'Era, C., & Pellizzoni, E. (2018). Exploring the inbound and outbound strategies enabled by user generated big data: Evidence from leading smartphone applications. Creativity and Innovation Management, 27(1), 42-55. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/caim.12241
Product Assurance Manager | Certified Project Manager | Sr Industrial Engr | MSc Aerospace Engr
4 年great article, Professor Buganza! detailed enough and easy to read. the closing questions are key. it is clear that you you know the following assumption which can be read in between the lines, but which I would like to make explicit: the risk of transitioning from Safety issues to Security ones. I don't have an answer to your questions, or well, I am doubtful and I have many, maybe too many, while instead I would prefer to only have a definitive and final one.
Project Manager of Carnival ACE projects
4 年Interesting thoughts presented by Buganza and Trabucchi. When you know how a system works, of whatever nature it is, like a mechanical, biological or physical system (e.g. a computer, a virus, or a climatic model), you can predict its behaviour, and more deeply you understand about its functionality, better you know how to stimulate it to get expected reactions, in one word how to control it. This is exactly what the world population hopes to be able to do as soon as posssible with the COVID-19: hacking the virus. But think for a while what could happen when somebody will be able to utilise the tremendous amount of personal big-data we give away, consciously or not, every day (e.g. our music preference, our purchases, what we read, where we live and how much time we spend to go to work, our hearth rate, how many friends we have, what we like and what we don’t...) to understand how the organic system called “homo sapiens” works... well, that person, company or government can control the humankind, can “stimulate” our mind to get “expected reactions”. In one word: “Hacking Humans”, to utilise the term coined by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari in its book “Sapiens”. This is what could happen, or maybe it is already happening...