ninadok
3 de febrero de 2020
During the last few years, the internet economy has been mainly developing using a business model that offers services for free to the end users, but at the same time creates profits by mining, aggregating, and selling personal and social data for commercial and surveillance purposes. Therefore, the lives of internet users are continuously electronically tracked, analysed, clustered and segmented in profiles and graphs: personal data as a commodity for the "markets of identity", with large implications on the users’ privacy and the rights related to personal data.
Under the quest for secure identities, governments, banks, social media platforms and many specialist communities have been driving the technical aspects of online and digital identities to become more sophisticated and able to record, analyse, and eventually monetise everything we do. In the research carried out by D-CENT, “Research on Digital Identity Ecosystems” a concrete analysis of the latest evolution of the Digital Identity ecosystem in the Big Data context is presented alongside economic, political and technical alternatives to develop an identity ecosystem that respects citizens’ rights, privacy and data protection.
As explained in the D-CENT research, in order to establish a competitive advantage in the market it is critical for companies to collect and analyse vast quantities of personal information. However, the financial and technical resources required for gathering and managing such massive amount of information is leading to the formation of global digital oligopolies. Companies such as Google and Facebook may have improved competitiveness, efficiency, and access to knowledge, but in their accumulation logic based on a new economic model defined by intense data extraction, data analysis, continuous monitoring, and prediction they are representing a new form of capitalism, namely “surveillance capitalism”.
The growing market of citizens’ data, which is creating an identity marketplace is harvested not only by the big tech brands but by other hundreds of lesser-known companies that are building all sort of analytics, trading personalised ads in real time and providing other ancillary services for a variety of industrial sectors.
On the flip side of the coin, governments have also increased the intensity of their surveillance to an unprecedented level, and even with the massive amount of data held by private companies, states maintain the largest databases of personal information. The documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden have brought to light the unprecedented mass surveillance schemas that governments are engaging in. Comprehensive surveillance is the way in which both the corporate world and governments are now operating and allows the two to cooperate in programs such as Prism: where the NSA and FBI have direct access to data from some of the major tech companies including Google, Apple and Facebook.
Read the whole article here.
