Politics has been turned into a market where obsession with data on individual lives is treated as a vital resource and their vulnerabilities fully exploited.
Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal
WHEN George Orwell penned down the shape of a surveillance state in his fiction ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, it seemed like he had sketched a dystopic world. For those who had any doubts, the global scams of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook that surfaced last week, it is clear: that the world prophesied by Orwell is real in present times.
The private information and details of unsuspecting humans across the world have not only secretively become the property of business houses who use this data to earn a quick buck, but also of political groups for purpose of their vote bank politics by manipulating voter moods and thus benefitting from the swings. Our lives are no more private affairs. They are transparent before technology masters who turn our daily routines, mundane habits, beliefs, fears and desires into finely processed data and deliver it to their clients to further exploit them. The daily lives of people, including the pizza they ordered or the ailments they suffer from, their penned thoughts circulating in the cyber skies are all under surveillance.
The exploding Cambridge Analytica scam tells us that information about people is being collected, stored and processed to produce psychographic profiles that can judge people’s thoughts and personalities almost accurately and then they are offered to the clients for business or electoral purposes. The information, much of it collected from Facebook, without the knowledge of its users, virtually brings every internet user under scrutiny of vested interests. The scam does not come as a bolt from the blue. The anxieties about internet privacy have been voiced by many across the globe for long.
Facebook’s business model of victimization of users by harvesting information of millions of its users world-wide was also not unknown. What the scandal has done is simply to confirm that these anxieties of people being pushed inside a huge surveillance machine, through a system that operates sophisticatedly, are indeed true. This system of operation allows certain powerful business and political lobbies to manipulate lives of individuals to their advantage by controlling their very minds.
Technology enables them to virtually control the social, political, educational, or legal systems as business companies and government agencies or political groups deploy new privacy-invasive technologies even before the public is aware that such a system exists, leave alone the possibility of the consent of the people. The thought is chilling! The facts just as grotesque! What could be uglier than the revelations made by a sting operation conducted by a UK based channel, showing Cambridge Analytica’s CEO offering a client, pretending to be representing a political party in Sri Lanka, the service of entrapping the client’s political rivals with secretly videotaped bribes or sex scams.
While corporate houses exploit the information for advertising and market survey through a system that is extremely complex and opaque, even more shockingly, the politicians are using the information to give a spin to the electoral results. The issue at stake is not only of violating privacy of individuals but dangerously to undermine democracy. Politics has been turned into a market where obsession with data on individual lives is treated as a vital resource and their vulnerabilities fully exploited.
Whosoever has the power of psychographic data analysis at his or her command can turn the tables on his opponents. The firm has managed to manipulate and control political upheavals across the globe. Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trump’s rise to White House by failing to rein in fake news and Russian propaganda. This has not been entirely unknown. But that there is a systemic use of such a machinery in many other elections around the globe is what now comes to light.
Two of India’s leading political groups, BJP and Congress, are said to be the firm’s clients. Its Indian partner, Oveleno Business Intelligence, lists the BJP, the Congress and the Janata Dal (U) as its clients. All these parties are engaged in mud-slinging over the issue and at the same time distancing from Cambridge Analytica, without an explanation.
Whether or not BJP and Modi managed its ‘Mission 272 plus’ in 2014 with the aid of Cambridge Analytica or Rahul Gandhi and Congress managed to change the mood in Gujarat in recent assembly polls, India’s worries of being under surveillance are not over. The fresh scam only enhances the anxieties that have already been caused by linking everything from mobile phones to bank accounts and insurance to Aadhaar, which is yet another data-aggressive way of controlling people’s lives and denying them their right to privacy.
The recent reports of Aadhaar data having made inroads to Ukranian based Russian companies may now appear far more serious. Reports revealing that the US companies contracted by Unique Identification Aiuthority of India (UIDAI) to build Aadhaar have clandestine and inexplicable links to Cambridge Analytica and a Ukrainian software company manifest that there is more method in this madness. As it is, by consolidating and centralizing information on the personal details and preferences of individuals, India appears to be just one step away from China which has consolidated reams of records from private companies and government bureaucracies into social credit system for each Chinese citizen, where by every citizen is not only under watch but also being scored for his or her individual preferences.
We live in a dangerous world where the technological inventions meant for human convenience and good are being used to create mechanisms of control and destroy in turn everything that humankind has achieved through the evolution of civilization.
Distraught by the devastating impact of the atomic bomb, that drew heavily on Albert Einstein’s discoveries and inventions, the scientist had remarked that the atomic bomb has changed everything but “our modes of thinking” and “we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe”. The destructive nature of technology, depending on the capability of the human mind to abuse its power, made renowned author Aldous Huxley say, “technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
The ability of human mind to use the technology of internet, whose benefits in sharing information cannot be underscored, to create an algorithm of surveillance for manipulating lives of unsuspecting people in an attempt to serve the financial or political interests of some proves Huxley true and re-invokes Einstein’s lament. Technology changes everything but the way human beings conditioned to vie with each other for exercising power over the less powerful remains the same. Technology only makes their efforts more efficient. Beneath the façade of the sophisticated technology, the human mind continues to be as barbaric in its ideas and approach.
