A dystopian future sponsored by your data
A dystopian future sponsored by your data
Let's start from the very basics of it
What is data?
In the most basic sense it's just an information about something. It can be anything. Your name, phone number, email address etc to what ice cream flavor you prefer when given a choice or what you are used to doing at what time of the day. The current accumulation of data may not be accurate, but it is getting there.
Who has these information?
Companies with huge data centers is kind of a very vague answer. The Google & the Apple are just obvious and even you know that. For the sake of simplicity banks, business conglomerates and big tech companies is my answer for major references.
How are they getting this information exactly?
Phones. Laptops. Credit/debit cards and what not. Ever since 2016, India has been hooked on to the Internet. The pace at which we developed and adapted to technology is amazing. A new trend in the market had been introduced. YouTube more specifically changed allot of people's lives. Social media saw a huge rise in users, many potential markets were discovered and so on.
But from where did they all start to make money from at the first place?
Advertisements
Ever since it's inception, it has been eating up people's lives. Every company these days has some sort of advertising in their content. From games to TV shows, everyone has some sort of an advertising technique. Imagine you are a huge company, with over a billion people who are ready to listen to whatever you say, how would you monetize that? how would you make sure that whatever you say or show has a guaranteed affect?
Targeted Advertisements
If you are not new to Instagram or any other similar platform you basically know how these targeted advertisements work. Whatever you google an ad related to it is shoved onto your face. So to answer a previous question exactly, how are they getting our information/data? There a number of ways to do it, I'm not gonna dig deep and turn this into a boring lecture. Basically whatever you type from your keyboard, whichever picture you take, wherever you go, the websites you visit, whatever you talk/listen to, etc everything is tracked and recorded. Your phone is capable enough to track everything and upload it onto the services you have signed up for, services like Google's products, Apple's ecosystem etc. Here’s a website that explains Why you shouldn't trust google with everything, it has a lot of other interesting articles so check it out later.
So what is the problem exactly?
Picture this. You live in an age where car's are learning to drive itself, Neuralink wants to capture your thoughts by putting a chip in your brain, heck there's even a tool called GPT-3 which has taken AI to a whole new level.
A little context about it if you are unaware of it, GPT-3 stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, it is a tool used to generate human like responses, but you can build basic websites (not sure how but there are demonstrations of it) and lots more.
When technology has advanced to such an extent where half of human tasks can be handled better than humans by software, how hard is it to predict a human's behavior? With enough data about you, like your preferences etc, it is insanely easy to manipulate a person. Previously Facebook was speculated to have had a part in swinging the American elections and we all know how that went. There is enough knowledge about human behavior, there is enough software and hardware(well almost) to process that knowledge and interpret that with your data. How is this any different from the movie matrix? Instead of huge machines and other stuff from that movie, we can be controlled and manipulated through a single device. And I have a feeling that targeted ads can be a foundation of it.
Here is a tweet from the founder of Gum road on how ads can get indistinguishable.
Ads have evolved, and they will continue to evolve. Differentiating them from the rest is going to be hectic. This trend will continue if not intervened.
Privacy is different from Anonymity.
Yes, I get it, the show Mr.Robot has given you all the knowledge on how to be anonymous, but not everyone can be like that.It is merely impossible to be anonymous even with a VPN. Here is a short video which explains a technique followed by companies to identify your digital presence throughout the internet.
For the lazy bugs who won’t watch the video, the video is basically explaining how browser fingerprinting is used to track you even if you use a VPN like tor. Due to human vulnerabilities it is possible to track everything about your day. In a nutshell tor is for anonymity and it’s humanly impossible to use it daily for privacy.
Let us discuss the business prospects of data first
To be honest, this is amazing for a new startups. A simple ad and you can expect a good outcome.
As a multi million dollar company, you will be forced to generate income no matter what the circumstances are,as a company with such resources and money, it is obvious that they would bend the rules according to their will and wish. The targeted ads method has been proven to bring income to all, benefiting creators, companies, startups, shops etc. This in a nutshell gives you a higher probability of being successful in terms of your product's future (if implemented properly).
Here’s some sort of a good news
As of now it is speculated that 3.5% of the internet has the capability of carrying out browser fingerprinting. 3.5% is actually a lot, but it’s not all of them, so yay?
Here’s sort of a sad part
Till now, every machine we used are basically running on binary i.e 0’s and 1’s. Everything we have achieved in the technology industry be it AI and other stuff, all of these are processed in 0’s and 1’s at the core of it. The next big thing other than AI is Quantum computers. These bad boys can operate on more than 2 states. Imagine commercializing these and bring in more power to computers and data centers (again, not sure if this is possible in the near future but let’s consider it) and clubbing all of your data. The outcome is left to one’s imagination.
Imagine this one possible way of advertising, a deepfake of creators showing up seamlessly in a video and telling you to install some app and seamlessly continuing the video, without a difference in the video, without the creator actually shooting that part, everything processed by a computer, with this, you won’t be able to even distinguish it.
Welp, I gave an idea for free I guess
So what do we do to avoid a future where human emotions are predictable by a 100% but also not lose out on the business prospects.
Here's my take on this situation
We as a race have adapted to changes since evolution, so first we do not lose out on those instincts by being careless regarding anything, be it your data or your daily life challenges. We have to adapt to new technologies and learn how not to lose out our vital information.
Bring in policies that look after data practices.
But if the government itself gets involved in this business then we are in for a rid.
This is another conversation in itself but it's dinner time so I got to wrap it up.
Lastly but not the least, as of 29 / may / 2020, 23.81% is the unemployment rate in India. We all might as well learn new technologies and tools and build new system of communications that evade the dystopian future awaiting us.