The Economic Engine of Tech is Surveillance | Meredith Whittaker on reclaiming Privacy

the initial policy foundation, the rules of the road for the commercial internet as set down by the Clinton administration and two key decisions that I think helped shape where we are today were made then. The first was there were no restrictions on surveillance for the private sector, no privacy guard rails. And this is not because we didn't know because there was no warning because the architects could never have foreseen the results of their creation. No, there was a lot of warnings from within the Clinton administration from, you know, across the board. There were organizations advocating about the, you know, constitutional issues with allowing mass surveillance on platforms, but nonetheless, no privacy restrictions.

And they did that cute little policy thing that they often do where they say like, "And if this is a problem in the future, we'll revisit it." Well, it's 2025. We have no federal privacy law in the US. And you know, the entire world economy now runs on surveillance conducted by five companies based in the US. So there we are.

Didn't revisit. The second was that as the business model of this commercial internet from among a number of choices that were clearly on the table, including a more public broadcasting effort, including a you know kind of a a social tax on this, including a number of different options. The option that was selected was advertising. So you not only have permission to surveil and no privacy safeguards, you have an incentive to do it. You have an incentive to know your customer and to compete with other platforms and others, you know, on the basis of, you know, we actually have the data about the types of people.

The lady with curly hair who lived in Brooklyn who likes yoga, we we know how to target her because we have information about her. And so this combined with the constituively centralizing monopolistic formation of the communications network that we've known since the postal service, since Western Union, since you know the state managed monopoly of the telecom companies and you know that was not regulated here combined to create key incentives that led us to a world where The economic engine of tech is surveillance. You monetize data. [Music]