How Calls for Privacy May Upend Business for Facebook and Google - The New York Times - 0 views
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People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen
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It has been many months of allegations and arguments that the internet in general and social media in particular are pulling society down instead of lifting it up.
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That has inspired a good deal of debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. At the furthest extreme, some dream of the companies becoming public utilities.
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There are other avenues still, said Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, including advertisers and large tech platforms collecting vastly less user data and still effectively customizing ads to consumers.
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The greatest likelihood is that the internet companies, frightened by the tumult, will accept a few more rules and work a little harder for transparency.
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The Cambridge Analytica case, said Vera Jourova, the European Union commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, was not just a breach of private data. “This is much more serious, because here we witness the threat to democracy, to democratic plurality,” she said.
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Although many people had a general understanding that free online services used their personal details to customize the ads they saw, the latest controversy starkly exposed the machinery.
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Consumers’ seemingly benign activities — their likes — could be used to covertly categorize and influence their behavior. And not just by unknown third parties. Facebook itself has worked directly with presidential campaigns on ad targeting, describing its services in a company case study as “influencing voters.”
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“If your personal information can help sway elections, which affects everyone’s life and societal well-being, maybe privacy does matter after all.”
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some trade group executives also warned that any attempt to curb the use of consumer data would put the business model of the ad-supported internet at risk.
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“You’re undermining a fundamental concept in advertising: reaching consumers who are interested in a particular product,”
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If suspicion of Facebook and Google is a relatively new feeling in the United States, it has been embedded in Europe for historical and cultural reasons that date back to the Nazi Gestapo, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and the Cold War.
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“We’re at an inflection point, when the great wave of optimism about tech is giving way to growing alarm,” said Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute. “This is the moment when Europeans turn to the state for protection and answers, and are less likely than Americans to rely on the market to sort out imbalances.”
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In May, the European Union is instituting a comprehensive new privacy law, called the General Data Protection Regulation. The new rules treat personal data as proprietary, owned by an individual, and any use of that data must be accompanied by permission — opting in rather than opting out — after receiving a request written in clear language, not legalese.
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the protection rules will have more teeth than the current 1995 directive. For example, a company experiencing a data breach involving individuals must notify the data protection authority within 72 hours and would be subject to fines of up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of its annual revenue.
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“With the new European law, regulators for the first time have real enforcement tools,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “We now have a way to hold these companies accountable.”
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Privacy advocates and even some United States regulators have long been concerned about the ability of online services to track consumers and make inferences about their financial status, health concerns and other intimate details to show them behavior-based ads. They warned that such microtargeting could unfairly categorize or exclude certain people.
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the Do Not Track effort and the privacy bill were both stymied.Industry groups successfully argued that collecting personal details posed no harm to consumers and that efforts to hinder data collection would chill innovation.
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“If it can be shown that the current situation is actually a market failure and not an individual-company failure, then there’s a case to be made for federal regulation” under certain circumstances
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The business practices of Facebook and Google were reinforced by the fact that no privacy flap lasted longer than a news cycle or two. Nor did people flee for other services. That convinced the companies that digital privacy was a dead issue.
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If the current furor dies down without meaningful change, critics worry that the problems might become even more entrenched. When the tech industry follows its natural impulses, it becomes even less transparent.
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“To know the real interaction between populism and Facebook, you need to give much more access to researchers, not less,” said Paul-Jasper Dittrich, a German research fellow
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There’s another reason Silicon Valley tends to be reluctant to share information about what it is doing. It believes so deeply in itself that it does not even think there is a need for discussion. The technology world’s remedy for any problem is always more technology