‘The business model of the internet,” writes the security expert Bruce Schneier in his excellent new book Data and Goliath, “is surveillance.” States engage in it for their own inscrutable purposes and – as we know from Edward Snowden – they do it on a colossal scale. But the giant internet companies do it too, on an equally large scale. The only difference is that they claim that they do it with our consent, whereas the state doesn’t really bother with that.
A big mystery for those of us who worry about the long-term implications of surveillance is why internet users seem generally to be unconcerned about this. It varies from culture to culture, of course: the citizens of Germany are more perturbed about it than are the British; but that’s understandable because large numbers of Germans had the experience of living under the analogue surveillance run by the Stasi. And in the US, endemic suspicion of the federal government keeps some people awake at night. But on the whole, across the world, internet users seem relatively unfazed by what’s going on.
Why is that? One explanation is that most people have no idea of how internet and mobile surveillance works, and – as the saying goes – what people don’t know doesn’t bother them. There’s something in that, especially given the speed with which internet access is increasing in the developing world – where most new users are connecting via smartphones. It’s not clear, however, that they know what they’re connecting to. “Awareness of the internet in developing countries is very limited,” writes Iris Orriss , Facebook’s head of localisation and internationalisation. “In fact, for many users, Facebook is the internet, as it’s often the only accessible application.” In such circumstances, it’s plausible to assume that the realities of corporate surveillance will not be obvious to many internet users.
These conditions do not apply in industrialised countries, however. And it would be patronising to assume that every internet user – except for the occasional geek – is a mug. Some people do read the terms and conditions to which they have to agree when signing up to use “free” internet services. They fully realise that “if the service is free then you are the product”. And yet they persist in using it. Why?
One possible reason is that they place a value on those “free” services. Various studies have tried to estimate what that value might be. A study by the consultancy company McKinsey, for example, asked 3,360 consumers in six countries what they would pay for 16 internet services that are now largely financed by ads. The conclusion was that households would pay €38 (£27) a month on average for those services. From this, McKinsey estimated that “free” internet services generate €32bn of consumer surplus in America and €69bn in Europe.
These calculations are music to the ears of Facebook and Google executives, who interpret them as proof that consumer tolerance of corporate surveillance is really evidence of “rational” economic behaviour. People put up with companies spying on them because they get a good deal out of it.
Into this comforting ointment, three academics have just implanted a number of flies. Working out of the Annenberg School for Communication in the University of Pennsylvania, they polled a representative survey of 1,500 US internet users to see what they thought about surveillance-driven business models. They concluded that internet companies are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that people give out information about themselves as a trade-off for benefits they receive.
The findings also suggest that users’ willingness to provide personal information to web services cannot be explained by ignorance. Instead, the researchers propose a different explanation – that “a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data – and that is why many appear to be engaging in trade-offs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.”
If this is really what’s going on, we have arrived at a very strange place indeed – a neoliberal paradise in which people display the kind of passive resignation Václav Havel observed in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule and analysed in his great essay The Power of the Powerless. “Human beings are compelled to live within a lie,” Havel wrote, “but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way.” Welcome to the networked future.