Digital privacy and our common life

(swiped from vox.com. Used without permission)

The ordinary American thinks of themselves as a customer, when in the business model of many of the companies, they're just a product. They're just trying to gather information about you in order to re-sell it to yet another third party who you don't know at all and had never any intention of doing any business with.

--Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) on National Public Radio, 4/10/2018

Mark Zuckerberg testifies down the street this week at hearings before the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Commerce Committees (Timberg and Romm 2018). Facebook has come under renewed scrutiny, again, because of revelations that the sketchy marketing firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data from tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent. Last weekend, I saw that Chicago is plastered with ads promising Facebook will be doing more to combat fake news and data mining (cf. Frenkel and Singer 2018). Weirdly, I haven't seen any of these ads in Washington.

Source: European Parliament

A couple weeks ago, with considerably less fanfare than Zuckerberg's appearance, Birgit Sippel, member of the European Parliament from Germany, told an audience at the Brookings Institution that while the EU is considering greater privacy protection, ultimately we must choose between two models of media. Sippel is the rapporteur for the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation, which requires more disclosure to individuals about use of their personal data, and increases penalties for violations (Brandom 2018). She additionally made strong statements in favor of individual control over what personal information is tracked, compiled and available to marketers during the course of the hour-long interview with Cameron F. Kerry of Brookings.

For me, the key take-away from Sippel's talk was that if there is going to be information, it must be gathered, and somehow the gathering must be paid for. In the days of newspapers, information was gathered by reporters and assembled by editors, all of whom were paid staff of the paper. To access the information, readers had to pay for a newspaper. (Truth in anachronism: We get daily delivery of a paper Post while we're in Washington; at home in Iowa, we subscribe to both the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the New York Times.) If we access the news on the Internet for free, there needs to be an alternative funding model, and for various reasons the model that has emerged involves tracking clicks and selling that information. Facebook, which has emerged from a number of long-forgotten competitors to dominate the electronic public square, is "free and always will be" because they make money selling the information they collect on their users.

My first reaction is that these are not the only two models available, though for practical reasons they may be the most likely outcomes. There are at least three other ways that you can get information:

1. Commercial broadcasting model. Broadcast radio and television stations are funded by advertising, so their material is free to the listener/viewer. The bet is that they can attract enough of the right kinds of users that advertisers are willing to pay dearly for access to them. Internet ads exist, although so do ad blockers.
2. Public broadcasting model. Public radio stations, and most other non-commercial operations, don't sell advertising, though corporate underwriting is increasingly approaching a distinction without a difference. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets a vanishingly small subsidy from the U.S. government, but for the most part public radio depends on the good will of user-donors. Wikipedia and Greater Greater Washington, to name a couple sites I frequent, make appeals for donations, but I don't know how successful they are.
3. Library model. If I wanted to read a daily newspaper growing up, I had to use the school library or the public library. Libraries are funded by governments or institutions and available to users, most of whom have paid taxes or tuition that funds the library. As Jane a.k.a. "The Other Dr. Nesmith" has pointed out, libraries combine the resources of the community to achieve "a whole world of resources just waiting to be used," far more than even a Zuckerberg could afford to purchase on his own.

Funded by taxes and donations:
Cedar Rapids Downtown Library grand opening, 2013

I want people to be paid, and paid well, for the work they do, but...

In my blogging, and in the course preparation I do in my paid job, I've become accustomed to having a large array of resources at my fingertips. I read sources with hot links, and use them myself, assuming that interested readers can follow their curiosity to more information about whatever aspect of the subject grabs them. I contribute to Greater Greater Washington and Strong Towns, and have even thrown the occasional ducat at Wikipedia, but I simply cannot fund all the web resources I use. Maybe a quarter a click?

I'm a baseball fan, but I stopped paying for online broadcasts when they raised the fee from $9.95 to $14.95 per year. I read articles about the Cubs on the Chicago Tribune website until they tell me I've reached my monthly limit, when I switch over to always-free cubs.com. Thomas Hobbes told us that when we look at ourselves we should see the whole of human nature, and I conclude that a paid subscription approach to information on the web would change the universe in which I've become accustomed to working and thinking.

Maybe I overrate how boring I am to data miners, but sometimes I'm willing to let whoever have whatever, just so I can use websites for free. Let Cambridge Analytica or Vladimir Putin try to troll me. I know how to ignore them.