📅 February 17 - February 23 | Scraping the depths

One week turned into two. Taking a short break is a good thing.

But, if I’m honest, I’m rather drained about the state of tech at the moment. It’s one bad story followed by another. From the obsequiousness, the knee-bending, and the sycophantic brown-nosing on display, the tech oligarchs have shown us in no uncertain terms that they are more about themselves than they are about their customers. It won’t last. It never does. That’s the story of the world. But the question is about what damage is being caused, and how long will it take to repair it?

The potential consequences are extremely dangerous, and I don’t feel as though this is hyperbole or over-egging what is at stake. I give you permission to laugh at me to my face if I’m wrong. I’d rather be laughed at than be even half correct.

We have never before been in a situation where almost every aspect of our daily lives is a simple SQL query away from abuse. Abuse from our governments that have gone rogue. Abuse from other governments that want to influence the enemy’s population, and on a more pedestrian note, abuse from unscrupulous companies hellbent on selling you something whether you need it or not, giving zero fucks about the state of the planet.

This is not a Disney good vs evil story. There are real consequences, real lives, and real people being hurt.

The real spyware

I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, and I’ve never held an account in any meaningful way. Quite the opposite. I created a family account a long time ago to see what the fuss was about, but this was many years into its domination of the public space of the Internet.

I was horrified by what greeted me.

No sooner had I created the account than there were a number of pre-created connections and associations that I would never have chosen had I had been given the choice.

The vibe was creepy from the outset, in only what I could describe at the time as a sociopath’s wet dream, the origins of the application were laid bare for me to see. Perhaps you don’t know or remember the original purpose for Facebook (the hint is in the name). It was an application designed to creepily and surreptitiously “rate” how “hot” college girls (female university students) were.

I felt I was being spied on from all directions at all times. From people I only fleetingly knew, or had passed in the Boulangerie, to the people who obsessively wanted to know what was going on in my life and the lives of others.

I felt nauseous and deeply uncomfortable about what the Internet of the masses was being turned into, even then. I hated it, and I shut it down as soon as I could, deeply regretting the fact that I had created the account in the first place.

I’ve subsequently exercised my rights as a European citizen to have all data about me removed, but I doubt that Meta has fully complied. With them refusing to comply with numerous laws globally, why would my tiny profile be any different?

Ads: Meta wants to be ‘less illegal’ - but much more annoying…

Unbeknownst to many, too, is that Meta has been exposed creating fake and shadow profiles, essentially giving itself the same functionality for targeted advertising, without the explicit consent of the users concerned.

And to anyone who hasn’t understood how the Internet actually functions, it boils down to one thing. Advertising. Or to be specific, the highly targeted digital advertising.

I’ve written before about how this is all smoke and mirrors and how the incentives are only aligned to the companies doing this, namely Google and Meta. There are thousands of other advertisers, but between those two they own the vast majority of the advertising spend on the planet, well into the 90s in terms of percentage points.

To combat this, we all need to earnestly expose these companies and change the narrative on ad companies like Goole and Meta. And no, they’re not tech companies, they’re ad agencies, and thieving ad agencies at that. They have been shown to falsely inflate prices through their biding systems that control both the supply and the demand, thus making businesses pay more for nothing extra.

Tech is a means to an end, and their actions clearly show this. The tools are a by-product of them getting their creepy stats about your last urine sample, or what you last looked at on a random website. That means we need to publicly call them out for the creeps they are and constantly until they behave differently. Do you know the origins of Chrome, the browser of choice for most? Let’s just say it wasn’t to provide you with the best browsing experience. That’s not fair. It was to provide the best browsing experience, to onboard the world so that the tool could be used to spy on you even more closely than you had been up to then and once captured, you would not be able to leave.

Users using other browsers frustrated Google because they could get to constantly spy on you whilst you went about your day on the Internet. So Chrome was born to centralise web usage on a platform designed from the ground up to collect data about your online habits, without them specifically or materially disclosing such. In fact, they specifically lied about that, too. Until they were caught.

How deep will this go?

Source: https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/osi-model/

Much like the OSI network model, to get more data about the packets being flung around networks, you need to go deeper and deeper into the stack. Which is precisely why Android exists. And the likes of Apple, who previously provided tools for computing with a good computing experience, have fundamentally changed and are now providing tools for advertising, that also happen to provide a good computing experience that is slowly being eroded.

Which leads me onto recent news about Meta’s other big projects that fly largely under the radar in the public arena.

Meta is BIG on Infrastructure. It has just announced that it will build a globe-spanning undersea cable to transport data between five continents. And this is just part of a decade-long plan to control and surveil you at every level of the OSI stack. The following animated GIF, gives you an idea of their expansion in global infrastructure control.

Source: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/facebook-meta-submarine-cable-ownership#map-header

I can’t know what you think about this, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable that more and more of the Internet, the system the world relies on for much of life itself, is being centralised and controlled by an ever-decreasing group of companies that have shown time and time again their self-serving intentions without regard for the rest of us.

This is both undemocratic and unbelievably dangerous at the same time.

These developments in internet infrastructure are tempting governments around the world to succumb to authoritarian tendencies. And the ubiquitous nature of tech, finding itself ever deeper in our lives, has done nothing to curb the authoritarian ambitions of governments around the world. Quite the opposite. Even those governments that fight against what they call ‘repressive and authoritarian regimes’ have found the centralisation of control of internet data from the deepest levels of networking to the applications and operating systems web use all the time, too tempting to leave alone. They are and will continue to be abused indiscriminately, harming the world as a whole. With the help of Meta and Google, governments with ambitions to snoop on the most private aspects of the life of every individual under their jurisdiction. And sometimes beyond. Yes, U.K., I’m looking at you! (More on that in the future when things have settled a little).

From 1950 to 1990, the East German secret police, the Stasi, controlled the population of the country through mass surveillance and a large network of informants that were used and dumped when they were no longer useful. What has been constructed in the 21st century Internet is a vast set of tools with powers the Stasi could only dream about. A network that doesn’t need any human compliance for information to flow back to central command. Your telephone, your television, your car, your fridge, everything you do is known to the companies that have just shown that they are not only willing to work with authoritarians, but will actively support and develop new tools for them to operate their surveillance.

This is not the Internet I want.

What I’ve tried to do here, perhaps a little clumsily, is make the link between tech and democracy, outlining some of the dots that make up the web of deceit and manipulation exercised now.

It also provides a hint about what you can do to disrupt this and the way only we as a mass can. Individually, our actions are worthless. Collectively, however, it’s an entirely different story. You should do two things. Participate in limiting your exposure to online advertising, blocking ads, ‘local-hosting’ (127.0.0.1) or otherwise limiting the flow of data from your devices to these companies. Secondly, you should make it known that you are not in agreement and that there are already many non-invasive solutions for businesses to advertise, for example, Contextual Advertising, which is based on content analysis and not privacy-invading attributes.

Remember, there is only ONE metric that is of value to you as a business, and that is if your ads provide more sales. Period. If you need to know my age, my sex, the colour of my skin, my income, where I live, and literally hundreds of thousands of other data points, you don’t deserve my business, and you have a serious problem morally.

And yes, as I’ve discussed before, distributed and decentralised systems should play a part too. And no, they are not the only solution.

There. That feels better. Have a great week.