Our Fractured Identities

AJ Kapur // The Watchdog

You are being watched. Not in the way of private investigators and tailing cars but in a way that we all have readily welcomed into our lives. As you read this article on your device, bits of information about you are being collected. The amount of time you spend on this website, your location, eye movements, mouse position and other tabs open in your browser all serve to form a better digital impression of you. But why?

Clive Humby, British mathematician and data scientist frontiersman, coined the phrase “data is the new oil” in 2006. His analogy succinctly predicted the future of the 3 billion dollar data broker industry unknown to most. Data collection and analysis is not a new concept. When you write journal entries or use a mood tracker, you collect data on yourself. When you use the data you have collected and cross-reference it to determine reasons for your mood or behavior on certain days, you are performing data analysis on yourself. However, the speed and frequency at which data is now collected, the sources for data and the subsequent vast range of applications we might not even know of is worrying. 

The collection of what is referred to as “big data” became possible with the advent of home computers and, especially, social media websites. People willingly post pictures, status updates and other sensitive personal information on social media. This information is stored and analyzed to predict behavior with the hopes of creating a better experience for users. As storage got cheaper and faster and computers got more efficient, the kinds of data that could be collected and stored expanded, too. From the trivial mouse position, time spent on a page and clicks, to the more insidious location, eye movements and browser history. Companies who collected data from the onset did so because they foresaw a high demand for data in the future. Our personal data, often collected without knowledge or explicit consent, sells for hundreds of dollars through legal and illegal channels. While some personal data uses are somewhat benign, like for “helpful” targeted marketing, there remains a vast, unaddressed amount of space for abuse. 

Anyone can buy data if they know where to look and cross-reference so-called “de-identified” data with easily accessible information to find identities, addresses, social security numbers and real-time locations. For companies who buy and sell data, this is a treasure trove of raw information that they can use to build individual customer profiles. For example, Mosaic, “a socio-demographic classification system covering the whole of the United Kingdom” by Experian, “intend(s) to provide an accurate and comprehensive view of citizens and their needs by describing them in terms of demographics, lifestyle, culture and behaviour.” On Experian’s website, Mosaic USA is described as a way to segment consumer lifestyles and provide a 360-degree view of customers. The categories on Mosaic are constructed by analyzing raw data collected by trawling the internet using underhanded methods and then sold to companies like Experian by data brokers. Experian and other companies like it conduct multi-step data analysis on the raw data, assemble it into neat sections and re-sell their analysis to data-hungry buyers. Your data is used to do exciting things like advertise new clothes to you and, less excitingly, determine your health care premiums

All of this tracking, collecting and analyzing, done without our knowledge, begs the question of who we are. Do we really know ourselves, or should we surrender that corporations who monitor us so closely know our innate desires better than us? After all, the purpose of refinement is the use of patterns to predict our brain, our thoughts and our future desires so expertly that we can be shuttled into exactly those boxes that we most love. I do not want to be in a box. I enjoy the serendipity with which I discover something entirely new to me and the challenge of trying to master a skill far from the ones that are innately mine. I find the notion that someone could construct my personality from a few clicks and purchases offensive and intrusive. It is constraining and violating to have my life controlled by a third party that buys bits of my personality in the hope of constructing a placidly grinning, one-dimensional facsimile of me. 

It is impossible to exist as an unobserved individual. Mass surveillance, which we thought would come á la 1984 with heavy-handed government oversight, is a welcome part of our lives. Personal devices make life easier, but they come with the cost of near-total real-time tracking. In a world where we are constantly under the microscope, we lose touch with who we are when no one is watching. Who are we but a handful of 1s and 0s, scores, IDs, clicks and purchases, assembled into a data matrix, thrust into a category so that an unknown entity can goad our behavior? The schizophrenics are right: there are cameras and microphones hidden in the walls of my home, the ones that I willingly let in for the semblance of normalcy. To be rid of them severs my connection to the world and to remain with them is living with the oppressive knowledge that I am being tracked.

Be the first to comment