Unwittingly giving up our privacies online

In the age of Big Data comes this fictional conversation (circulating on Viber):

“Hello, is this Gordon’s Pizza?”

“No, sir, it’s Google’s Pizza.”

“Did I dial the wrong number?”

“No, sir, Google bought the pizza store.”

“Oh, alright then, I’d like to place an order please.”

“Okay, sir, do you want the usual?”

“The usual? You know what my usual is?”

“According to the caller ID, the last 15 times you’ve ordered a 12-slice with double-cheese, sausage, and thick crust.”

“Okay, that’s what I want this time too.”

“May I suggest that this time you order an 8-slice with ricotta, arugula, and tomato instead?”

“No, I hate vegetables.”

“But your cholesterol is not good.”

“How do you know?”

“Through the subscribers guide. We have the results of your blood tests for the last seven years.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t want the pizza you suggest. I already take medicine for high cholesterol.”

“But you haven’t taken the  medicine regularly. Four months ago you purchased from Drugsale Network a box of only 30 tablets.”

“I bought more from another drugstore.”

“It’s not showing on your credit card, sir.”

“I paid in cash.”

“But according to your bank statement you did not withdraw that much cash.”

“I have another source of cash.”

“This is not showing on your last tax form, unless you got it from an undeclared income source.”

“To hell with your pizza! Enough! I’m sick of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. I’m going to an island without internet, where there’s no cellphone line, and no one to spy on me...”

“I understand, sir, but you’ll need to renew your passport. It expired five weeks ago....”

The parody on personal info extraction and exploitation isn’t funny in light of recent news about Facebook. The social media behemoth is totally lax with subscribers’ personal data. It had allowed an academic to entice 270,000 of them with cash to take an app-based personality test. What the users didn’t know was that, in the process, they shared their Facebook friends’ personal preferences too. What Facebook didn’t know then was that the researcher sold the digital data and analysis to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which in turn shared it with clients, including Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Exponentially the app harvested yet more data from friends of friends, for secret, potentially vile, commercial and political purposes. Reported to Facebook, the world’s eighth most valuable firm took eight months to act -- lackadaisically at that. It tried more to hide the breach from the press than to correct it. About 87 million users were victimized, mostly in America. Second worst hit were more than a million in the Philippines, followed by Britain, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Most Filipinos couldn’t care less about “Trumpolitics.” But their favorite social media outlet’s – one in three of them is on Facebook – cavalier disregard for privacy protection is cause for alarm. Personal info could be misused to micro-target users to buy certain products and vote for certain politicos.

Thought control is Facebook’s very business model. It glues subscribers for hours to its features. Through services, searches, and subsidiaries like Instagram it gathers more and more user preferences and behavioral patterns. It then peddles the caboodle to third, even political, parties. Its take from display advertising in 2017 was $40 billion.

US and European authorities are to investigate and possibly penalize Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica mess. That would expose how social media are used for antisocial ends. Personal data are harvested from the Web by direct questions and technological morphing. Users knowingly give personal info, say, illnesses, in exchange for services, uhm, cheap pharmaceuticals. In time, enough info is compiled about individuals. Artificial intelligence, also called machine learning, speeds up the analyzing. From one’s shirt or dress size, waistline, and shoe style, for instance, garments, apparel, and fashion sellers are able to push products online. People with similar tastes can be classified for marketing focus, and grouped like fans clubs for testimonials.

Through sly technology, though, billions of people unwittingly have given up basic privacies. One is privacy of transaction. Online banking and purchases can reveal one’s assets to unscrupulous parties. Another is privacy of health, Online medical inquiries, medicine purchases, and chat room exchanges can expose the individual’s delicate info. Most prevalent is privacy of location. Through gadgets and apps, users’ locations are shared with unknown lurkers. The ubiquity of CCTV cameras in streets also can pinpoint one’s innocent movements up to fractions of a second for sinister motives.

In China social media are now being used for social control. Communist rulers reportedly have made tech giants like WeChat, Tencent, and Baidu help rate citizens via their use of and postings online. Through a points system, their citizen rankings can rise or drop. On such social credit rankings depend if they can travel by air or rail, buy property, send the child to a good school, or even eat at a nice restaurant. Dissidents are isolated. To cap it all, China heavily has invested on facial recognition technology. Through CCTVs and video posts, including selfies, it aims to track the activities of each of the 1.3 billion Chinese. Facial features are matched via artificial intelligence with supposed emotions on a given moment. Soon to go is privacy of thought.

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