How corporations divert focus towards government surveillance

On the last day of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2014), Facebook and the Global Network Initiative demonstrated what was one of the only flaws of the otherwise well-organised and interesting global internet conference. In a workshop organised by Ranking Digital Rights, the representatives of internet firms frequently talked about transparency, human rights and privacy as important values to protect and cherish. But when searching for those guilty of affecting those values, they exclusively pointed to government requests (i.e., government surveillance), and not to their own privacy enforcement policies (i.e., corporate surveillance of user data).

It is not that government surveillance is not dead important, but so is corporate surveillance, as it has direct effects on individuals. Certain members of the Global Network Initiative, for example, make a lot of money on selling and reselling our location data, which is highly sensitive personal data. Why are they not transparent about that? Facebook, which has its own definition of privacy, makes users believe that they can actually be in ‘private mode’ on the platform once 'privacy settings' are turned on. These settings are backed by long, hardly understandable and constantly changing terms of service and/or conditions.

Google on its part hosted a tent event on 3 September at the IGF 2014. Interestingly, the Google event was all about government spying and not a word was spent on what Google’s practices are when it comes to the world's largest private human database, on which it sits. Being the owner of this database makes Google much more powerful than many governments.

We are in the ‘age of big data’, and big corporations have access and process a lot of data. Yes, governments can abuse and take advantage of their might over data, as we have for example seen thanks to the Snowden revelations. This said, corporations can also abuse big data. We have observed this in many contexts and situations already, e.g. when the supermarket chain Target created a pregnancy prediction machine or when OkCupid and Facebook made experiments with their algorithms. The latter is now being collectively sued by 25.000 Europeans for not respecting European personal data laws.

So, let’s put corporate surveillance on the agenda. Not of a closing Internet Governance Forum, which has missed an important opportunity in Istanbul, but on that of upcoming surveillance debates.