In some countries, all mineral rights are owned by the
government. In these countries, your
family may have owned a plot of ground for generations. But if the government thinks there's oil
under it, they can come in, drill a well in your back yard, and make millions
off the oil they find—and not give you a cent.
And it's all legal.
Other countries with different traditions regarding property
rights view this situation as unjust. In
the U. S., for example, mineral rights usually vest in the property owner,
which is how many otherwise dirt-poor Texans got rich when oil was discovered
on their previously worthless land.
What goes for land that you buy should also go for things
that you do. If your actions lead to the
creation of something that is of value, it would seem only fair that you should
receive the properly evaluated equivalent for that value—in money or other
valuable and exchangeable form.
In Don't Be Evil, journalist Rana Foroohar describes
how large tech companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google, as well as many
smaller ones, collect data from us that is estimated to be worth nearly $200
billion. When you click on a link, or lately
even talk about certain things in the hearing of your personal assistant or
your mobile phone, that information is noted, logged, and used to sell advertising
and other things that the giant tech companies get real money for. And as the Internet of Things grows with its
ability to track our movements and other actions, this data stream will only
get bigger.
What do you get in exchange for providing the lifeblood of
commerce for these firms? They would say
that you receive lots of free stuff in return—free web searches, a free
personal Facebook page, free ads for things you may want to buy, and so
on. And this is true. But it is far from the ideal free-market
exchange of value, in which both parties come on a more or less even footing to
an agreement after sharing essential information and comparing the potential
exchange with any others that they might make with other parties.
To put this situation in perspective, Faroohar points out
that $200 billion is more than the total value of the annual U. S. agricultural
output. In other words, it's as if the
large food companies (ConAgra, Tyson Foods, etc.) took everything that U. S.
farmers grow, but paid them nothing for it.
Nobody would put up with that, and nobody would keep farming for very
long either.
But just living an ordinary life these days means that you
constantly do things that produce little bits of valuable data for the likes of
Facebook, Google, and Amazon, whether you really mean to or not. And in a technical sense, it is perfectly legal. The cadres of tech-company lawyers who write
the incomprehensible boilerplate on every software agreement that you lie about
reading before being able to use the software make sure of that.
One of the good outcomes of the otherwise horrific Nuremberg
Trials of Nazi war criminals was the development of the Nuremberg Code, which
has since been adopted to govern experiments involving human subjects. One of the core principles of the code is
that participants must give informed voluntary consent to being experimented
on. In other words, they must clearly
understand the possible consequences of participating in the experiment and be
able to say yes or no freely after making an informed decision.
If we regard the entire data-mining exploits of the big tech
companies as a large-scale long-term experiment on the public, it is easy to
see that we as individuals are at a vast disadvantage compared to the firms
that profit from the data we generate.
Withholding our data would be difficult or impossible, especially when
we don't even know that we're providing it (e. g. when Alexa or your mobile
phone eavesdrops on your conversations).
And we have no idea what consequences will result from our actions. And I include among these consequences the
fact that the rich monopolies represented by the above-named firms get even
richer, while in exchange I receive certain services that are convenient, true,
but have value that I would be hard put to estimate in dollar terms. Even if I did, it's doubtful that the value I
perceive as getting from these firms would come anywhere close to the money
they make off me by mining it.
The fact that I have to go through mental contortions even
to think this way shows how deeply disguised the process is. As an engineer, I'm trained to think of
worst-case scenarios, and if I let my imagination wander in that direction with
regard to the situation of data mining, I might come up with something like
this: The U. S. economy becomes even
more two-tiered, with a very small number of very wealthy people working for or
associated with the largest monopolistic tech firms, and everybody else on some
kind of government-paid dole to keep them from starving, because most other
jobs have vanished. Research and
development dries up here and moves to China, where most future technology
developments happen under the firm control of the government there.
I could go on, but I think I have made sufficiently clear the
point that every day, with every click on a site associated with the largest
tech firms, we allow them to obtain data that we make, but that they profit
from.
I do not pretend to have a good solution to this problem. When similar situations arose in the past,
such as during the "robber-baron" period of the 1800s when railroads monopolized
essential transportation and commodities, the government had to intervene with
countervailing forces embodied in things like the Interstate Commerce
Commission and antitrust laws. If the
economy, the job market, and society in general is not to be further hollowed
out by the activities of the large online tech firms, which are now
indisputably having a negative effect on the political viability of our
democracy, something needs to be done.
But I'm not sure what.
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