The internet giants are losing our trust. That’s not good for anybody
The other day, my flight from Toronto to Ottawa was cancelled. How did I learn of this? Google sent me a notification — it wasn’t the airline. And I found it helpful because it enabled me to reschedule a few things so that I was able to get home to have dinner with my family.
What’s not lost on me, however, is that Google provided this service to me and I paid for it. It wasn’t free. I paid for it by giving up my personal information to it. It is going to use it to make money. This week, I’m OK with that tradeoff. It might not always be that way.
This week is also the week Facebook is appearing before a parliamentary committee looking into whether it should do something in response to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica fiasco. That ordeal, to refresh your memory, is about how millions of people had their personal information used in ways that seem futuristic, icky, and possibly unreasonable. Canadians should know that our privacy laws in the private sector allow organizations to collect, use and disclose personal information only so long as it is reasonable.
Daniel Therrien, the privacy commissioner of Canada is investigating the Facebook matter and indicated that he’ll have results within a year. Of course, by then, new tools, new data-mining techniques and new manipulative schemes will be hatched by the dozens, if not more.
The commissioner says that the laws are currently inadequate. He cites examples of organizations doing privacy badly only to be slapped on the wrist and, sadly, in some cases even profiting from their bad behaviour. He says he needs greater powers of enforcement. Within the industry, we mostly think he wants the power to levy administrative fines like so many of his international counterparts do.
He also clearly wants some rules to apply to our political parties. The parliamentarians conducting the hearings into the Facebook matter have stirred a hornet’s nest that they may not be able to quietly walk away from. That is, we know that the personal information of individuals was used to try to manipulate election results and that means it was ultimately used by political parties. There have been plenty of scholars, such as the University of Victoria’s Colin Bennett, who have long advocated that Canada must join the rest of the modern world and make our political parties accountable when it comes to profiting from the massive amounts of personal details they know about citizens.
I think it also raises the issue of trust. We are clearly quite deep into the information age, where data or information is the most important commodity to private organizations, charities, doctors, hospitals and governments. Our individual personal information is among the most valuable.
But our willingness to trade our individual personality traits will only work as long as there is a workable, trustworthy, balance built into our system. Otherwise, we might start to back away from this trade-off arrangement. I have certainly noticed some friends have announced they would be deleting their accounts as a result of the Facebook scandal. It’s their way of taking back some control and saying “I’m not OK with this. I don’t trust you anymore, Facebook.” For this information age to work for everybody, we need to be able to trust.
After the Depression of the 1930s, modern democracies came to grips with the fact that they were far along into the Industrial Revolution and needed rules with respect to the most important commodity of the day: capital. We are now at a similar crossroads in this Information Revolution. What are we going to demand of our political leaders? Should we do nothing and suffer a digital depression, one where everyone has lost trust in the information economy? Why not be proactive and listen to some of the ideas being put forward by the privacy commissioner and others? Better we should march into this new era with the faith that personal information will be used in ways where we believe the trade-off we’re making is a fair one.
Kris Klein is a partner at nNovation LLP and is managing director for the International Association of Privacy Professionals in Canada.