Ruminations: It's All About Control : Harvesting Personal Data

"The unholy alliance between Canadian politicians and Big Tech features prominently in the political parties' own use of social media data to track, profile and target voters."
"With the help of social media companies, political parties scrape online information posted by Canadians and use it to send manipulated and micro-targeted content attuned to each individual's behavioural triggers, in order to persuade them to vote a certain way."
"The result is that even people in the same household will not see the same political content."
"As the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol showed, if voters are not seeing the same information, they are not living in the same world."
"Distorting communication between voters has serious moral and political implications, which is why the EU created free people. In modern, technologically advanced democracies, data protection laws should build trust in the digital environment by properly protecting citizens and safeguarding hard won human rights, such as the right to privacy."
Jim Balsillie, founder, Centre for Digital Rights

Governments in the 'free world', the democracies allied in their struggle to counter the Beijing Communist Party's all-consuming traction advancing its agenda to control the lives of all its citizens through facial recognition technology and web outreach to ensure complete resignation of individuality and adherence to the proscription of criticism of Xi Jinping, the CCP, and its actions against the Uyghurs, Tibetans and Christians, shudder with horror at the casual dismissal of human rights and interference in peoples' privacy.

There are, however, certain parallels between what Beijing is accomplishing in scooping up data holus-bolus and controlling its massive population through advanced AI technology, and what certain democracies are also engaging in. The Internet has intruded in every aspect of human life. The great global public has embraced the wide open accessibility of knowledge, entertainment, communication and commerce with an enthusiastic appreciation of how much of our lives have changed, how much time is spent online, how casual friendships are made, how commerce is conducted, how fascinated we are with the options for contact, gaming, expressing ourselves.

Surveillance technologies have forever altered our concept of privacy. On the other hand, most people are not as seized with the issue of their personal 'privacy' as are campaigners for the protection of the right to privacy. Many people won't hesitate a heartbeat before airing the most personal details of their lives, live on stream, and with no concern over divulging such intimacies to the worldwideweb. Everyone nurtures a sense of personal entitlement overriding the need for personal privacy.

There is a cure for all of this. It is simple enough. Walk away. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems since those willing to forego any further use of the technology we have all grown so dependent on -- is willing to leave it all behind as an expedient in honour of privacy protection -- are few and far between. Violation of privacy rights does not appear high on the public's list of necessities to live a self-respecting life. And since the public really doesn't much care, why should those who govern them when the situation confers benefits on government?

Jim Balsillie, with all his experience, expertise and deep-seated knowledge of fundamental human rights can point out, as he has that "Behavioural monitoring, analysis and targeting are no longer restricted to social media, but have spread across a wide range of products, services and sectors, including retail, insurance, finance, health care, entertainment, education and transportation. In the early 21st century, every industry became a technology industry and now just about every internet-enabled device, and online service is a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data that's used to power the surveillance economy. This has not only meant the death of privacy, but has served to undermine personal autonomy, free markets and democracy."

Yes, indeed. And the public's complacency with all of this is obvious enough. A lack of imagination works to fail to instruct people of how much they have and will continue to lose in the greater scheme of things simply because most people cannot identify the fact that they are being unscrupulously manipulated. There are such subtleties of silent interference they are not recognized, and if they are, shrugged off as being insignificant and irrelevant.

And, as Balsillie points out, "... Privacy is a fundamental human right. Privacy is a gateway right to other rights and freedoms, including free expression, personal autonomy and freedom from harassment. Privacy is treated as a human right in numerous international conventions, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This right should be codified in our data governance laws, as it is in the European Union's landmark General Data Protection Regulation."