By Gordon Hull
A little more than a year ago, I floated a version of the thesis that Big Data functions as a form of capitalist accumulation by dispossession. “Accumulation by Dispossession” is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” and the basic idea is that capital has to extract value from individuals in a way that pushes them into its system of value extraction. It does that by depriving them of other sources of value. For example, the enclosure laws in 16th-Century England served to dispossess commoners and small-scale farmers of the ability to subsist off the land, and so thrust them, “free” into the urban labor pool. Absent this initial dispossession, the formation of the urban market in “free labor” would have been impossible. My argument focused on the dispossession of preferences, and was that data analytics function to deprive us of the capacity to form and express preferences outside of the logic of capitalist markets. That is significant because the more our “preferences” are restricted to those things that we can buy, the more our lives are determined by market logic – and the more things that exceed market logic become invisible. We are dispossessed of the ability to imagine life differently.
So. Back to Facebook. A recent piece by Sam Biddle in the Intercept, based on a leaked internal FB document, suggests that Facebook is deeply engaged in exactly this process. According to Biddle:
“Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed “FBLearner Flow.””
So if you’re “at risk” for switching brands of something, you can get targeted advertising encouraging you not to. They deliberately nudge your preferences before you’ve formed them. Concerned yet? Here’s more:
“The document does not detail what information from Facebook’s user dossiers is included or excluded from the prediction engine, but it does mention drawing on location, device information, Wi-Fi network details, video usage, affinities, and details of friendships, including how similar a user is to their friends. All of this data can then be fed into FBLearner Flow, which will use it to essentially run a computer simulation of a facet of a user’s life, with the results sold to a corporate customer. The company describes this practice as “Facebook’s Machine Learning expertise” used for corporate “core business challenges.””
The Biddle piece goes through this in some detail, including comments from law professor (and my co-author) Frank Pasquale, and it’s well worth the read. It’s also worth noting (again) that we’ve known this is coming: a 2013 paper – the one that showed FB likes predicted demographic information – said that FB likes predicted personality-type. So it had predictive value. It sounds like FB can do a lot better than basic personality type, though.
In other news, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has mountains more data about all of us than FB:
“Google Analytics is far and away the web's most dominant analytics platform. Used on the sites of about half of the biggest companies in the U.S., it has a total reach of 30 million to 50 million sites. Google Analytics tracks you whether or not you are logged in. Meanwhile, the billion-plus people who have Google accounts are tracked in even more ways. In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts. Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we've installed, demographics such as age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we've shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn't use information from "sensitive categories " such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health. Because it relies on cross-device tracking , it can spot logged-in users no matter which device they're on.”
I would be shocked if they didn’t offer advertisers and data brokers a service comparable to the one at Facebook.
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