Citizens need to ask why their data is being held online

Very slowly, but very significantly, a global fight for control of your personal information is unfolding. A ruling in the European Court of Justice against Google last week means that if you perceive information about you that pops up in online searches to be inaccurate, out of date or irrelevant, you can ask the search engine to remove it.

At Google’s annual shareholders’ meeting last Wednesday, executive chairman Eric Schmidt said: “A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google’s perspective that’s a balance . . . Google believes having looked at that decision, which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong.” Thankfully Google does not make decisions in the European Court of Justice.

The problem is that internet users have largely colluded in their own mass surveillance, but you can’t really blame them. Tech companies certainly haven’t been forthcoming about what they are doing with people’s data, never mind what government agencies have been up to with it. And tech companies depend on people repeatedly using their websites, social networks and apps, and therefore plough massive resources into designing “services” made for repeat use, often to the point of compulsive use and even addiction.

Moments of discontent
But while most people remain utterly apathetic about how their personal information is being used, there are an increasing number of moments of discontent among internet users who might be occasionally creeped out by how targeted Google's advertising is, or get frustrated with incessant Facebook use by their partner, or would prefer to actually talk to their friends instead of trying to distract faces lit up with the glow from smartphone screens. At the very least, a sporadic mindfulness is emerging.

While tech companies steamrolled towards billion-dollar successes, there was no en masse questioning of the impact of such technology on our personal behaviour, our identities and – at a state security level – our privacy.

Instead we celebrated their entrepreneurial spirit. The genie is out of the bottle, and those who intend to “disrupt” the narrative – a term beloved of tech companies – are met with phenomenal hostility. Chelsea Manning is in jail.

While newspapers pick up Pulitzers for their coverage of the NSA leak, Edward Snowden remains a pariah. Julian Assange is effectively imprisoned in an embassy, although for reasons more complicated than masterminding Wikileaks. The David versus Goliath struggle is now left up to concerned architects of legal cases on behalf of those who might want to take a minute to look up from their latest SnapChat.

The right to be forgotten is really a right to control one’s personal data. But tech companies don’t want you to be in control of that. They want you to give it up so they can control social interactions, experience, cartography, communication. The old-fashioned systems of civil rights law, data protection, privacy and copyright are just too damn clunky and incompatible with the internet’s broadly libertarianism-fuelling-profit take on such issues.

But we cannot forsake ourselves for nice email accounts, cool apps and fun social networking. They are not “free”. And it is of course possible to be an avid internet user and social networker while maintaining a critique of such a system.

The right to privacy and freedom of speech and expression do not have to be in conflict with each other. Last month a judgment was delivered by the European Court of Justice on the Data Retention Directive in a case taken by Digital Rights Ireland. The practice of retaining data, the court found, “entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of fundamental data . . . [and also] entails an interference with the fundamental rights of practically the entire European population.”

Dragnet
Retaining all internet users' personal information in a dragnet isn't a passive or accidental practice. It is not about unticking a box. It is an intentional activity, and the ramifications for those whose data is retained is being muddled, given the secretive nature of tech companies' future projects. Although the horse has bolted on privacy, it's important that citizens at least try to claw back something from internet companies. Why retain such information? What are they going to use it for? We need to start asking these questions more often and louder.

You are not a data portal, or an information hub, or a “user”. Your information is not “content”. You own yourself. It’s time to talk seriously about the balance of control, the control of what should be a democratic tool, but instead is monopolised by multibillion dollar companies, harvesting people’s information to make money from advertising.

We should neither fear a dystopia nor strive for a utopia, but question controlling online interests, and build nuanced critiques of what we’re receiving in exchange for unconsciously selling “us”.