Why should you protect your personal data?
When you use the internet, companies can (and often do) gather your browsing data.
This data is often used by companies to improve their marketing, and to improve their services by monitoring how users interact with their service.
These are real benefits, not just for the companies but also for the users since they can enjoy the improvements made to the services.
But while this data gathering might seem quite innocent, problems appear when this is scaled up.
Companies like Google and Facebook are very adept at following users around the internet using sneaky techniques like the Facebook like button or the invisible pixel.
So what do these tech giants do with your data?
In the least harmful cases, they use your data to target you with specific advertisements.
This might not seem harmful but when big tech companies have enough data, the influence they can have on users becomes massive.
The technique used by big advertising companies to analyze your data for ads is called behavioral targeting.
This is a process where data of users is analyzed to create a demographic and pyschographic profile which companies can use to target you with ads that match up with your age, location, interests, and much more.
With these targeted ads, people are more likely to be swayed to buy a product.
As the amount of data that companies have grows, the ads will be even more tailored to your needs, and the manipulative effect these ads have on people becomes stronger.
One of the results this has is hyper-consumerism, where people consume for the sake of consuming.
This has massive impacts on the way people live their lives, but also on the pressure we put on ecosystems and the planet as we require more energy and more resources to keep this trend going.
The concept where companies gather our data to sell us more products is called “surveillance capitalism”, which to me seems like the worst of both worlds: mass surveillance with profit as its goal.
“The Google and Facebook algorithms not only know exactly how you feel, they also know myriad other things about you that you hardly suspect. Consequently you should stop listening to your feelings and start listening to these external algorithms instead.”
- Yuval Noah Harari
Apart from money, there are also political purposes to collect data and use it to manipulate people.
In 2018, a massive scandal happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
In this scandal, a company called Cambridge Analytica acquired the personal data of up to 87 million users through Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica then used this data to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections.
Although Facebook has voiced regret for this breach, and has banned Cambridge Analytica and one of the key players in this scandal, Aleksandr Kogan, from its platform, it shows how dangerous it is to have massive amounts of data collected and centralized by companies.
A smaller example is the police using location data gathered by a company called Geofeedia to monitor protestors after the shooting of Michael Brown.
These examples paint a pretty dystopian view of the future with Brave New World traits on one side, and a 1984 view on the other.
And here is where I think the advantages of Free software become apparent.
“For democracy to survive the digital age, technology companies, governments, and civil society will have to work together to find real solutions to online manipulation and lack of data privacy”
- Sanja Kelly, Freedom House
What is free (libre) software and how will it protect us?
As first formally defined by Richard Stallman, free software requires 4 essential freedoms:
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
There are many reasons why we should choose to use free software instead of proprietary software.
There are many benefits for education and technological progress that free software can give, but in this article I will focus on the benefits related to personal data.
Let’s look at how free software affects the data collection by companies.
First, because of freedom 1, users get complete transparency about the code that runs on a website.
This means that malicious code like spyware can be looked for and found out by individuals and organizations.
If a website does contain malicious code, users can copy the code, improve it and redistribute it (freedom 1, 2, and 3), either through sharing the improved source code or by hosting the new version themselves and allowing others to use it.
Note: This does not need to be done for no money.
Free software doesn’t say anything about the price you can ask for a service you deliver, only that the source code should by freely available.
Learn more about this here.
This gives companies a much bigger incentive to maintain strong ethical standards and protect their users privacy.
If they don’t respect their users privacy, the users are free to take a copy of the code, improve it and redistribute it.
This reduces the power companies have over the software they make, and puts the power in the hands of people.
It would prevent companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon from abusing our data, since the alternatives would be more plentiful and of better quality.
Another benefit is the prevention of government backdoors in software.
In the USA especially, it is well known that the NSA spies on American citizens.
This is often done by forcing companies to cooperate and allow the NSA to get access to the software through a backdoor.
If the software would be free, these backdoors can not easily be hidden within the software.
And again, if they are found the code can be copied and the backdoor removed.
This way, the software is more flexible and people are more protected from companies and governments.
These are just some of the ways free software can protect your personal data from companies and governments.
Let me know what you think about it, and whether I missed anything!
