What is our information worth?
With all the news lately regarding the NSA, we once again have to ask ourselves: What is our information worth? Obviously, it is worth quite a lot if our government is willing to spend billions of dollars collecting it. Previously, we've asked ourselves the same questions when Instagram altered their EULA, stating they claim the rights to market all images shared on the site. Coincidentally, this has been Facebook's policy the whole time essentially, but when the company began its ever encroaching push for targeted ad revenue, we realized that our data is more profitable to these companies than what ever dollar amount they think we'd be willing to pay to use their service. As Facebook ramps up to incorporate tagging, to further complete our marketing profiles, many of us will no doubt ask the question again: how much is this information worth? And perhaps it's more important to ask what it's worth, because there are two driving motives for these large data mining entities: profit, and power.
States will use the information to detect, smother, scatter, scramble, or otherwise disrupt any unpleasant or unfavorable behaviors. The state does not care to make profit outright off the data, because those behind the programs know that with enough information on any given individual, they can control all the outcomes. For now it's shielded under terms of "counter-terrorism" and "national security", but many of us are starting to think otherwise.
Corporations, especially those we are most giving with our information online, often feel as if the public at large is not willing to pay for the services they provide. To be sure, this is true, but we have shot ourselves in the foot in accepting their best alternative. Now, we face obtrusive ads that ultimately ruin the utility of the web services we have come accustomed to by cluttering the interface, distracting from content, or downright playing to our habits, vices, and interests with uncanny accuracy. Not only this but our deeply private emails passwords and sensitive information is within the confines of server that owes no notion of privacy or security to the customer. As we know, we face these negative side effects of the current system because we have given up the rights to our production for the right to consumption and free rent.
If our data and information truly is worth something, then by rights, we can consider producing it to be work. Work that should be compensated like any other. If we exchange this work for the rights to use the service, we are simply agreeing to a simplified form of feudalism, in which we are the serfs, the data we produce is the grain, and the services and facilitators we are beholden to act as the land owning noble class, able to coordinate, transport, and package our individually meager contributions into billions of dollars annually. It is their ability to aggregate and apply information on a macro-level that makes this information so valuable, and it is only our belief that we couldn't apply it as well ourselves that keeps us within the confines of the current status-quo.
Eventually though, the peasants revolted, and some time later, we thought to apply the ideals that men should be entitled to life (or land), liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without rights to the information we contribute and control over the information we choose not to contribute, how can these ideals still ring true for us today?
Why and how can it be worth so much?
We also have to ask ourselves why and how our information is worth so much to these super-entities. Again, it's partially their enormous stature and macro-scale application of the information that makes it so valuable to them, but its also our perceived lack of infrastructure and ability to market and manage it ourselves, that makes relatively easy to convince an internet hungry populace to give it up.
To be clear: Its not the data itself that's important, it's the data about the data. It might not make much sense right now, but this is the meta-data that the NSA claims to be solely interested in. In fact, it might be the one true thing they've said.
That photo you took of your cat on thursday wearing skinny jeans and sipping Starbucks with your iPhone is in no way relevant to the bigger scheme of things in the immediate sense. It's not an amazing picture, and your filter makes you no artist. But what is important is the metadata. What makes it important is that it's about a cat, that its about skinny jeans, that its about Starbucks, that you used your iPhone.
It is important to remember that all tags are considered metadata, and the NSA has no qualms in picking this up and using it to their advantage. The same goes for marketing directors and analysts the world over.
All that these groups need to achieve their desired profit is your description of the content. They simply need to know how many times #cat #skinnyjeans #starbucks #iphone is thrown into the mix. Marketers want access to this data to make sure they're using relevant terms to convey their products, and so they convey relevant products to interested parties. Facebook can give them both, at a price, all thanks to the information you work to produce.
States want access to this data to locate information and citizens participating in or assisting undesirable behavior. Tags are great! They makes it easier to connect people to data, data with people, and people to eachother. But in the wrong hands, it can easily be manipulated and misconstrued.
What rights should we claim to our data? We now see how clumsily all these institutions with any level of macro-control or oversight are grappling for control over it, and its time we kill the music and think long and hard over who has the rights to our information.
If we claim first rights to benefit economically from our own work contributing data, and prohibit corporations from selling our data and metadata, or even market-profiles comprised on our metadata to third parties, we can solve one aspect of the conundrum. Web services could no longer harvest and market our labor, we could maintain the rights to distribute and profit from our own creations, and share them freely with each other as we see fit.
It still doesn't allow us any security against the state, which as we know, thinks it can help itself to our meta-data at any moment. Currently, the Restore the Fourth movement is tackling this aspect of the issue, and we can all be a part of the solution. Remember that the Fourth Amendment refers to:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
We are not breaking any new ground in asking for privacy when it comes to the works we record. We are simply recognizing that "papers and effects" of 1776 cover "digital papers and effects" of 2013.
Check out Restore the Fourth to see how you can be apart of the first steps towards taking back the right to what is ours. Because to answer the question, our information is worth much more than the bottom line and the profit margin. That is all secondary. Our information IS our freedom. Without it, we have none. And when they own it, they have it.
@shawndavisATP
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