It’s a felony to open someone’s mail and read it. It’s a felony to wiretap someone’s phone. Yet Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies make billions in profit recording your keystrokes, reading your emails and spying on websites you visit and articles and photos you download. What gives?
In Europe, this is not so. Since 2018, Europe has enforced GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation. It protects citizens from being spied on while online and protects their data. It’s not perfect, but it’s far more than anything stateside.
Even so, Google hasn’t complied well and has been fined $57 million for GDPR violations. Facebook was fined this year for $1.3 billion for privacy violations.
Of course, all this spying is to profile you and sell that information to advertisers. The EU fined Google $2.7 billion for antitrust violations related to digital advertising.
In the U. S., Facebook just settled a $725 million privacy lawsuit. That class action lawsuit accused Facebook of sharing user data to third parties without users’ permission. In 2021, the EU fined Amazon $877 million for privacy violations.
In September 2022, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner fined Instagram $403 million for violating children’s privacy under the terms of the GDPR. This involved personal information on minors. Facebook owns Instagram.
WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, was fined $255 million by the EU for privacy violations. The list goes on and on.
In an article in Forbes titled “Is It Time For A U.S. Version Of GDPR?” author Saryu Nayar writes, “Personal information on individuals is collected with every click on every app and every flash of a payment card. As the internet grows, so, too, does this data harvesting. As users, we allow it because we get something in exchange: a free social media account, use of search engines that answer every query, discounts from loyalty programs, free photo storage and more. For the providers of these services, the payoff is mass monetization of the personal data they collect.”
Medical information is already protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA). The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) does the same for students’ private information. What are we waiting for?
States are already acting, including Virginia, California and Colorado. But federal action would be more uniform and less chaotic.
The problem is one of money and power. Big Tech is so powerful that it controls Congress. Of the ten richest companies in the world, four make money spying on you and selling your information: Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The lobbyists for these companies are in the thousands. Big Tech funds hundreds of “think tanks” which spout anti-privacy propaganda. Their power is almost unlimited. This is a dangerous, scary situation that we, as United States citizens, now find ourselves in.
We are being spied on and manipulated by algorithms designed to control our thoughts and behavior. But like the proverbial lobster in the slow boiling pot, we are oblivious. We think we are in control. We think we choose but it is an illusion. The choices we have to choose from are limited by what Big Tech wants us to choose.
Now there are some who find freedom in the wealth of information online. To be sure, a small fraction of the population has the insight and energy to avoid blatant manipulation. A small fraction. The masses are being manipulated for money, or worse, they are being manipulated for control.
It all started with the Communications Act of 1996. Congress wanted to encourage the Internet, which was just a baby. Congress, in its ultimate display of unintended consequences, awarded legal immunity to Internet platforms. The idea was that if platforms were held legally responsible for all that their users posted, endless lawsuits would never allow the platforms to grow and prosper.
What Congress failed to grasp was that if Internet platforms were not held legally responsible, they would grow into horrible monsters beyond anyone’s control. And that’s where our nation, indeed the world, now finds itself.
Never in the history of publishing was any platform given immunity from 500 years of libel and slander common law. But Congress did it in 1996 and the rest was history. When Congress was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021, the baby Internet that Congress coddled returned home with the vengeance of an 800-pound enraged gorilla.
The Northside Sun is legally responsible for every ad, every guest column, every letter to the editor, every word in the newspaper, regardless of who writes it. Same with a radio or TV station, a book or any other traditional media. But not Internet platforms.
The idea is that these Internet platforms are not “editors” or “publishers” but just neutral platforms for individual expression. But this is not the least bit true. Facebook and Google manipulate what you see. They are anything but neutral. They spy on you, profile you, serve you up what will make them money off of you and manipulate you.
The U. S. Supreme Court had a chance this year to call a spade a spade and bring down this house of cards. They punted. They were chicken. They didn’t have the guts or power to bring down the most powerful economic oligopoly in the history of the world. They threw out the case on a procedural technicality.
Google News steals the content of Emmerich Newspapers daily, despite my cease and desist demands. There was a bill in Congress, passed by the appropriate committees, to force Big Tech into federally supervised arbitration to determine fair compensation to journalists and small news providers like the Northside Sun and its sister publications. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker was a sponsor.
Then I got a real world front-row view of the Big Tech lobbying machine at work. All these “studies” from “think tanks” started appearing predicting doom and gloom if this bill passed. Our industry association tracked how Google and Facebook funded these think tanks but nobody cared or noticed.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which had been included in the omnibus spending bill, got cut in private meetings behind closed doors.
Big Tech and its lobbyists won yet again. Meanwhile, local newspapers and media outlets are closing at a rapid rate. It is impossible to compete with a voracious oligopoly that has the ability to record American’s keystrokes and then sell that information to the biggest advertisers. Buying off Congress is just the icing on the cake.
