Metaversal Mining

At last the BBC’c Virtual Revolution Series series is starting to deliver with Part Three – The Price of Free.

I get the feeling that this is ground that the presenter is much more confident on. Away from that pesky technical detail which for some reason she still characterises as West Coast techno-utopian and on to the developing sociology of the world wide web. I’m sorry but you can’t say that the body of the web is independent of its internet bones. But I’ll stop flogging that particular horse as I’ve dealt with in in parts one and two of this four parter.

The first half of the programme is a pretty decent historical analysis of the development of the commercial internet, from the faltering steps of the Dot.com boom/bust (enter Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com) and Amazon’s winning model, through Google’s idealistic beginnings and on to the global trade in personal information.

The central position of this episode is that we don’t actually know what the current winning commercial model of ‘targeted advertising using mass surveillance of web activity in order to support free at the point of delivery services’ will cost in socialogical terms in the long term. Its a good and relevant question given the relative youth, the relatively-unregulated nature of and global pervasiveness of the web, but one that you can pose about any commercial or even institutional activity.

Lets have a look at that statement; The other big ‘free at the point of delivery’ services that we get are more often supplied by government (in the UK). A few examples being the police, the health service, the armed forces & the legal system. We pay generalised taxes to support those services and the government decides how to apportion that money to those services. We don’t currently pay an Army tax which goes up every time the UK fights a war and down when peace comes (that could really change the political dynamic of war fighting, no ?), nor do we pay an explicit police tax (though much of the UK’s policing is supported by locally raised taxation rather than generalised taxation), we definitely don’t pay an NHS tax.

No, we pay income tax and VAT (purchase tax) that is raised by the government knowing about financial transactions that we as individuals choose to make. We accept that the services provided cost us money, and are willing to forgo some privacy in order that the money may be collected by an authority that is not partial or commercially oriented.
And that is the answer that this program seems to come up with; the bargain that we make with the commercial entity that is today’s web is ‘information for service and we, the service providers, will use the information however we want’. If internet users don’t know that this is the bargain that they are making they should, but at the end of the day targeted advertising is a form of taxation. The big issue with that transaction is that since the entities collecting the information are not governments accountable to electorates, they cannot be relied upon to treat the information with the respect that it deserves. Indeed as commercial organisations they cannot be relied upon to exist from one year to the next, so any regulation of data collection has a built-in trans-generational issue to get over as companies ‘inherit’ on another’s databases.

Its perhaps interesting to note that direct the parallel of this argument, the mass surveillance of web traffic by governments, is one that is massively contentious. It is challenged by legislators and civil society alike and portrayed as the end of responsible government by many and the beginning of it by some.

Next week’s program is going all psyche major and looking at a global shift in the ethics and understanding of privacy could mean. I’m going to set some homework – please read the PEW centre’s report on Teenagers use of social networks.