Data Grab by Ulises A. Mejias

Author:Ulises A. Mejias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Data’s Lone Adventurers

The story of Big Tech, when seen the right way up, is really the story of data colonialism. The main characters are usually large entities (corporations, governments). But as with historical colonialism, individual adventurers play an important role too. They too can be conquerors or conquistadors, and engage in what one writer has called ‘surveillance frontierism’.100

A curious example of this occurred when in May 2022 two powerful men shook hands on a deal that they hoped could potentially bring them great benefits. One was Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro. The other was Elon Musk, president of Tesla and SpaceX, and now owner of Twitter. The handshake, sealed in a luxurious resort in Porto Feliz, signalled an intention for Musk’s Starlight satellites to bring the internet to 19,000 isolated rural schools, and to monitor the environment in the Amazon rainforests.. It is doubtful now the agreement will go forward under the administration of the new president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, but it casts a retrospective light on the ambitions of more than one type of adventurer. For the real purpose of this proposed deal, we might surmise, wasn’t doing good to schoolchildren or the environment, but data extraction, plain and simple (meanwhile, Musk’s Starlink system is already being used by illegal miners in the Amazon).101

We met another adventurer earlier in the chapter: Australian Hoan T on-T hat, the brains behind Clearview AI, whose facial recognition app hit the headlines in January 2020.

Recall the app’s basic recipe. First, scrape billions of images from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo – in fact anywhere we are expected to show our face – and process them with high-level AI to distinguish those faces from each other in ever more precise ways. Then use the resulting metadata to support someone else’s decision process. For example, the decision processes of an entity who wants to know whether this face, seen partially from an odd angle, is the same face that identified itself on that Facebook post. Finally, license the recipe to law enforcement agencies in the US and elsewhere, and you have a tool that the law could only dream of. There’s no evidence incidentally that Facebook, YouTube or any other platform anticipated this use of the billions of smiling faces they host, but then there was never anything in their platforms to stop it.

Ton-That saw nothing wrong at all with what he did. As an enterprising individual who, as he put it, ‘grew up on the internet’, Ton-T hat made exactly the same move that, on a smaller scale, Mark Zuckerberg performed as a Harvard student when he downloaded and used without permission his female peers’ portraits to create Facebook’s precursor: FaceMash.102 The lineage is clear, since neither saw this as raising moral issues. As Ton-That put it, this was just ‘the best use of the technology’.103 And yet, Ton-That (and Zuckerberg) were also making the classic colonial move: grab everything because it is just there, ready for the taking.

Let’s put to one side the evidence

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