The Internet is amazing. It’s one of humanity’s greatest achievements. There are things online
that you can discover which you’d never ever find out about if you were confined to reading books
at your local library. You can use social media to discover new people from all corners of the world
and directly call politicians rude names. Best thing about it is that it’s all...free. Aside from
electricity costs and broadband subscription, of course, but the sites themselves are all free.
But it isn’t that simple. The complete transformation of our society in the past
twenty, or even ten years wasn’t because tech companies gave us this connectivity
out of the charity of their hearts. It came with a price; your information.
For these companies to make money, they need to show you advertisements. It’s how nearly
all free services work, right from the days of radio. But what makes internet advertising
different to radio and television is that internet advertising can be personalised. Personalised
ads are more likely to be clicked and make more money for both the tech company and the sponsor.
Everyone is unique. There are billions of internet users, every one with their own personality..
It would be impossible to create a unique advertisement
for every single one of these people. Luckily, we have outsourced our advertising
capabilities to artificial intelligence. In the server rooms of Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Twitter, and more, the AI is given a single instruction; make users
engage with advertisements as often as possible. So what you see on your Facebook feed, your Google
search page, or your YouTube recommendations has been custom tailored to you by a robot.
To begin with, this wasn’t so bad. It’d take your age,
location, gender, maybe analyse your posts or site usage history,
and produce a custom ad for a product that most of your demographic would make use of.
Single mother, 43, lives in Ohio, recently watched videos about baking? Here’s an ad for your local
supermarket’s 30% sale on baking powder. White male, 23, lives in London,
looking up books on Amazon about investing? Here’s an ad about a subscription to the Economist.
However, starting in 2012, these companies began expanding the scope of their tracking network.
Soon they began analysing your browsing history, how long you spend on certain sites, what you
text to your friends, the pictures you take, what you like, what you comment on, by turning on your
device’s microphone they can hear things you say in real life, where you’ve been with your phone’s
GPS, what WIFI networks you’ve connected to, and sometimes even turning on your phone’s camera and
taking a picture without you knowing. And they can do this because of cookies; little bits of
code installed on your computer when you visit a website. This tiny bit of code can find out
so much about you, and send it to a database constantly updated with every tap, snap, sound
input or movement you make with your phone. All of this information is bundled up, analysed, and then
assigned to your profile. When an advertiser says they want to target a certain group of people,
tech companies know exactly who is most likely to engage with the sponsor down to a T.
Facebook’s AI can even accurately tell if someone is gay based on how they take
their profile pictures, as was the case with an East Coast man in 2013 who’s Facebook activity,
browsing activity, and other trends matched with the trends of hundreds of thousands of other gay
people. The AI decided he was probably gay, and showed him ads about counselling advice that helps
people come out to their family. Not only that, but Facebook can tell if you are going to break
up with your partner or if you are falling in love with someone new, just by your internet habits.
In short, we don’t know how deep this tracking goes. We don’t even know how it works! The AI
these companies use are given a single instruction like “maximise user engagement”, and then they
code themselves in a programming language they made up that humans can’t even understand.
And if you think you can just delete your Facebook account to escape it, sorry kiddo but Facebook
never deletes your account unless you personally submit a full request to. The instructions on the
website about “deactivating your account” just merely put your profile into an archive, where
it is continually updated anyway by information supplied by Facebook’s tracking cookies
that are still installed in your computer. Even if you’ve never had a Facebook account
they’ll create a shadow profile so that when you do sign up, or return to Facebook,
they can start showing you hyper-personalised ads right away.
Facebook and Google have further designed themselves to be a necessary part of everyone’s
lives. Messaging, news, event management, outreach, charity fundraising, disaster relief,
remembering birthdays, work groups, games, movies, weather, jobs, buying and selling.
Most people will find it very difficult to get by in the modern world without access to at
least one of Facebook or Google’s products, which is why you can’t afford to delete it.
And if you can’t delete it, then they can continue harvesting your data and serving
you better and more refined advertisements. Amazon, too, have branched out into countless
avenues and products to ensure what you use is always within their digital sphere,
so these services can co-ordinate and feed into the algorithm.
Not only do these companies make themselves necessary to your life, but they also try
and make you addicted. Studies show that for young teenagers, a smartphone has the
same addictive qualities as cocaine. Social media apps are built around
encouraging addiction; endless scrolling, refresh buttons that actually don’t do anything,
fake notifications, push notifications and encouragement of echo chambers.
More addiction means more use, more information for the database, and better targeted ads.
Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, they all do it.
All this, just to show you better ads and make them
more money. How much money? For the average user…$12 a year.
Social media is heralded as the media that you control;
you get to pick what you read, see, hear, watch, whenever and where ever you want.
But is it really you? Or are you merely given the illusion of control?
Surely, we must legislate against this. We must pass laws that defend the most minute facets of
our lives from being harvested against our will and turned into to products for other companies.
Unfortunately, your government will not leap to your aid.
Because your government wants this to happen.
In mid-2013, Edward Snowden, a computer scientist working at the National Security Agency revealed
that since the September 11th attacks, western governments have been secretly monitoring and
reading the private communications data of their entire citizenry. That’s everything from emails,
to phone calls, to instant messages, and with the sheer volume of data that the
modern smartphone collects, governments have no shortage of information at their fingertips.
In 2014 the British government was caught hacking people’s webcams at random to take
photographs of their users in the off chance they caught them in the act of committing a crime.
It didn’t, but between 3% and 11% of the captured images did include nudity.
Bear in mind just because they were caught doesn’t mean they stopped doing it.
Nearly every developed country has passed a law of some sort authorising
local police forces to seize and monitor people’s internet traffic, regardless of
whether or not they have a warrant or if the person is suspected of doing anything wrong.
The more information big tech collects, the more information the government has access to. If you
think you’re immune because your country has laws prohibiting government surveillance, think again
because they’ll only ask other countries to spy on you and send them what they find. This is called
the Eyes Network, and it isn’t a conspiracy. This network publicly admits it exists.
By the way, if you’ve ever posted a picture of yourself on any of these sites, you’re probably
now in this facial recognition database [with, uh, neo-Nazi connections] that’s also used by
hundreds of government departments, politicians, law enforcement agencies, and private companies.
But of course, only people guilty of crimes need to be worried by this, right?
If you haven’t committed any crimes the police won’t find
anything suspicious, so it’s OK for the government to read my stuff, right?
To this I have two counter arguments: The principle and the practical.
Firstly is in principle. By the very existence of mass data harvesting, you are presumed guilty of
a crime. If you live in the west, the only way police can search your home is with a warrant,
and they can only obtain that if you are suspected of committing a crime.
If you wouldn’t accept police searching your home without a warrant,
then you shouldn’t accept it on your phone or computer either.
Wanting privacy isn’t a sign of wrongdoing, it’s a sign of freedom.
The second is practical. All that data collected about you is stored somewhere.
Whether it’s on a server room in California or a government database in the middle of nowhere,
it all has a physical location. And these databases can be hacked. They have been
before. Seeing as they’ve been tracking your every digital move of the past decade,
how long is it until hackers or other malicious actors get that sensitive information? They could
do anything with it. Blackmail you, steal from you, identity theft, impersonation.
Employees at Amazon have been caught listening in on Amazon Alexa recordings and sharing “funny”
conversations to their social media. Just be glad that’s the worst they’ve done so far.
Foreign powers, too, have an interest in hacking and obtaining the data of western citizens,
and who knows what they could be doing with it. Even your own government could use it against you
if the right person or party was elected. It’s a risk you run, and the longer you
run it the more likely it becomes. But does it work? Does this actually
keep us safe? Uh, No. In the twenty years communications surveillance has existed,
not a single terrorist attack has ever been prevented through mass data harvesting.
Your whole life, both digital and in person, is being illegally put at risk for no reason.
You’ve seen the proof and you’ve heard the arguments. Tech corporations follow your
every move and log your every action to sell you products while your government is complacent in it
as they can use it as a tool to spy on the population, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.
If you’re still watching you probably want to do something about it.
Unfortunately, you won’t ever be completely immune from hacking and surveillance. That’s just
a fact of computers; it is impossible to create something completely un-hackable and untraceable.
That being said, there are some steps you can take to minimise the risk and reduce the
amount of surveillance and tracking done on you. I was going to have this be an entire section of
the video but this script is already too long so in the description there’s a blog post I’ve made
that’s basically a master post of everything you should do and changes you can make to your digital
habits to protect yourself, so I’d recommend you to check it out. Some of the things are quite
easy and take five minutes so if you don’t do anything else at least do the easy stuff.
That’s it, so thanks for watching.