Back to blogging after a summer hiatus.
When we think about privacy, we often think about our darkest secrets, what we have (or don’t have) to hide, how our secrets could be revealed and who may find out. Such thinking is justified but often ignores a much greater (but less obvious) problem especially for those with “nothing to hide:”
…Humans are easily manipulated.
More precisely, humans are easily manipulated by sophisticated algorithms that know everything about us. Such manipulations are not 100% effective but still have a massive impact in the aggregate on each of us. If you think other people are prone to manipulation but that you are too smart for that, you are probably overestimating how special you are (at least in this aspect, you may be special in other ways); human decision-making is broadly influenced by small factors. But perhaps you are special and immune to manipulation. Perhaps regardless of how your circumstances change and what ideas or information are presented to you, you will not change your decisions or beliefs. Well, that is the literal definition of closed-mindedness, and it is increasingly difficult to be both open to new ideas and unmoved by new information or environmental factors.
As humans, our decisions can be greatly influenced by subtle changes to our environments. The more those shaping our decisions know about us, the more effectively they can tune our behavior to their will. Privacy lies not only in our individual secrets, but also in the collective story our data tells. The innocuous details of our life easily become linked together and reveal patterns about who we are, what we believe, and how to best alter our actions.
The aggregation of all this data enables companies like Facebook to generate detailed personality profiles which in turn enables advertisers to create hyper-targeted ads. During the 2016 US presidential election, Cambridge Analytica utilized this information to assess which users could be vulnerable to misleading ads and political propaganda. In a 2019 interview with yahoo finance, former Facebook Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Alex Stamos expressed his belief the problem is broader than Cambridge Analytica:
“[The problem] is that today there are twenty Cambridge Analyticas that still exist. They’re just not dumb enough to steal data from Facebook. They legally buy it from Equifax and Transunion and Acxiom and all these different data brokers. And Facebook and Google create an ecosystem for those to exist by allowing them to then hypertarget ads.”
The problem is not limited to advertising content or to Facebook. Hundreds of government agencies and corporations have access to vast detailed information about us. They control the platforms, context, and environments in which we make hundreds of decisions every day. Sometimes their incentives are aligned with our best interests; often they’re not. They may not manipulate our decisions with 100% effectiveness, but they have the potential to influence thousands or even millions of our decisions, so changing our behavior a mere 5% of the time still has a massive effect on our lives.
In order to understand the impact loss of privacy has on your life, consider the following questions: Who has the ability to manipulate/influence your behavior? Your beliefs? How does a lack of privacy enable them to do that more effectively? What are their incentives as it relates to your behavior? What do they want to happen?
Thanks for reading. Keep an eye out for Part 2 of “Manipulating Humans”