Observations of the Internet 2019: Information and Control Issues
Twenty-five years ago World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee thought that the Internet would be something akin to a Victorian how to book from which readers could enquire about anything from removing a stain, to the extent of the British Empire in 1900. In short it was to be an information emporium. Today it can do all of that and much more.
The other original Berners-Lee idea was that the Internet or World Wide Web would be open and free and not controlled by vested interests. Of course that has not happened as we have seen the growth of Google and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with all their untutored undemocratic biases to control data and information about their users. Their primary objective is not to provide a social platform but to sell user information for their own commercial benefit. Their protests in public hearings in North America and Europe are akin to a child being found with fingers in a cookie jar.
Information is too valuable to remain free in the minds of some social media executives. Perhaps this is one of the greatest discoveries of the Information Age. The Internet data gathering have made billions of dollars and created huge concentrated wealth. That wealth snowballs as the Googles and Facebooks build control and as they buy out innovative competition and become concentrated and wealthier as the days go by. Their automated artificial intelligence algorithms collect and structure information 24/7. How they capitalize further on their information gathering, now and in the future, remains an open question with serious implications for everyone’s personal information integrity and security.
Each customer/user/participant on the Internet social media services has a profile that they provide willingly to these providers simply by chatting daily with their friends. If you were able to assemble what Google, Facebook and Twitter know about any user, and the potential cross references of data items that exist on their systems, an information profile of an individual and their lifestyle interests, biases, prejudices, politics and beliefs can be produced and made available.
These social media businesses are capable of providing more than basic marketing metadata about types of users. Nothing really prevents intimate individual profiles from being assembled. Internet government regulations to prevent this are very weak at this time in the history of the Internet. It is doubtful whether government regulators come close to understanding what social media can produce from their huge computer installation emporia.
Intelligence and security services can and likely do access this data level material and pull it into individual profiles. These organizations can do this now with impunity. They will, of course, say they do not do this. However with the capability in place it is hard to think they use don’t use Internet data, information and ultimately knowledge to combat terror or conduct information warfare or even conduct disinformation. Perhaps it sits until needed. No-one fully knows the extent of data becoming information and eventually knowledge that can be assembled from Internet social media and other internet commercial activity. Assume that if the material is there, some interested party will be mining it for some purpose.
Russian exploitation of social media to influence elections in the West has largely been established. The new operations of intelligence agencies have to include the Internet for intelligence gathering, propaganda, misinformation, and economic warfare. An intelligence service that does not operate on the Internet would be out of date, out of touch and missing key operational opportunities.
In an age where many people have smart phones capable of data it means that every roving phone is an interactive entry/exit point to the Internet. It is the ultimate fragmentation of the Internet down to the individual on the move. Individuals can be tracked if they use their phone. Literally 4.68 billion humans are at their own “headend” of the Internet with a mobile phone. Forty percent of these phones are smart phones with even more Internet capability. Smart phones are a growing market and literally each phone a hand held computer terminal into the Internet’s vast network of information.
A networked infrastructure like the Internet is its own message and medium simultaneously. The message is the social changes it brings to daily life. It is a profound change to how humans operate each day. You can be fully out of town but never out of touch. It is the first ubiquitous medium and seamlessly connects the remote places on the planet to urban spaces. The smart phone has become an anchor for how people live their lives. Observe people around you as they connect life’s activities through their smart phones.
Third World countries have jumped a giant step into the First World by rapidly adopting cheap mobile phones. Those mobile phones are now quickly becoming smart and so remote areas of the world are in touch with each other and any other place and person of Earth. The information age First World can be downloaded to the Third World creating a cross cultural experience that is profound. Also the Third World is instantly connected to the First World. Terror can be set off by a phone call. The phone that sets off a bomb could be kilometres away in another place and time zone.
Where does all this lead? Clearly the Information Age is about who or what companies control personal information and for what purpose. Facebook started in a university dorm as a neat idea. It has developed into a giant interactive system of personal information that is provided willingly by its participants. The danger is how this information is used and that is not clear at this time. It is an uncharted domain for propaganda, hatred ridicule and contempt as much as it is for innocent social exchanges.
Can a private social media company be a provider of information to governments, crime, terror syndicates and intelligence services? The answer is of course yes. Can the systems of social media companies be penetrated by well funded intelligence services or by private marketing firms? The answer must be always yes. Will this happen? It is inevitable that if valuable data, information and knowledge is available it will be used, stolen, accessed and manipulated.
The outcome of this situation is privacy is gone. Political systems are developing to take advantage of the techniques provided by the Internet, first to master micro marketing for elections but also for day to day control and power and very likely the suppression of individual rights in many cases.
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