The New Slave Economy

It's just like the old movie Soylent Green. Just like the slave trade. You are the product. You are what is being consumed, and you have no control, no say and in some cases, you don't even know it's happening.

The internet economy is made of people. It is consuming us as data. Without our permission, explanation or compensation.

Prevailing wisdom by the companies is that the data is aggregate, each person's data is indistinguishable in the larger structure. True and not true.  In a stew you don't know if, at any moment, you are eating the first carrot you put in or last.  The untruth is that the stew you are included in is also used to target you, because the stew always needs more carrots.. "Oh, you're a carrot? How about joining our nice stew? Many carrots here."

We have all experienced doing a web-search for a vacation, or a product, and then being bombarded with ads for those very same places or products. Or how about a major online vendor who offers product suggestions that "other people who viewed cerulean blue sneakers also liked..."  The most innocuous apps and internet connected products collect your information and whenever they can, sell it, and you. Even if you tell FB or Google not to collect or sell your information, that does not apply to third party ads, surveys and forms that you fill out while on Facebook, Google or anywhere else. There is also nothing stopping platforms, which you have asked not to gather info on you, from buying it elsewhere.

There are other services which collect information about you and many others. Some even scrape data about you from websites without the website's permission (see Cambridge Analytica for example). That data is then used to categorize society into neat little stacks for consumerization.  The data can even be bought back by the platforms you have asked not to track you in the first place.

With wearables, mobile computing, cloud systems and Internet of Things, it all gets worse.

Although the plaforms and companies are guilty of exploiting the situation, the root
problem is two fold; users lack of control of  information about them and the question of Terms of Service as a legally binding agreement between companies, users and community.

User data is a Commodity. Customized packaged and sold. Yet, consumers derive little benefit from the product crafted from information about their online activity. Companies will say the internet is the benefit. But when that benefit is used to target, sell and gather more data about you, is that true?

A more equitable system would offer specific services for users who explicitly authorized data collection for/by that service and that service only. Straight up value for value.

This would empower users in how, when and where their data is used. It would also assist in converting website's Terms of Service (TOS) into the contractually binding user protection document it should have always been.

Most companies treat their  ToS seriously. More so since the EU starting enacting strict community protection laws. The reality is that, in their current form, ToS are not binding on the company for most situations. Especially in areas not covered by law.

It may be harsh and extreme to call all this slavery, but loss of control of personal data collection can't be called freedom.