"Feels free" and the data collection business
Ashlin Lee and Peta Cook contributed another article on surveillance to The Conversation this week, this one highlighting what they see as the inadequacies of the Reset the Net campaign. They say that "while the campaign is laudable in its efforts to raise the issue of surveillance, there are some glaring oversights present", mainly because the campaign neglects the huge amount of data collection undertaken by non-government actors, including some of the campaign's own supporters.
All this drew the usual cluster of comments bemoaning the surveillance society in which we supposedly live. The trouble is, as I saw it, the targeted advertising for which this data collection is essential is what enables all the "free" services that are so popular with Internet users. Consequently, avoiding or eliminating it is not so straightforward as naïve anti-surveillance commenters (and, indeed, Reset the Net) seem to suppose.
George Burns followed up with a suggestion that early "cypherpunks" and academic free-content advocates provided the foundation for the present dominance of corporate advertising by insisting that content be provided free of charge. It's hard to say whether or not cypherpunks and academics in particular were responsible for the preponderance of advertising on the Internet, but the widespread expectation that Internet services be provided free of charge is surely a major contributor to it.
Working in copyright and technology, I occassionally heard someone suggest that music retailers could combat copyright infringement with a business model that "feels free", which I supposed to mean some sort of comes-with-music or ad-supported approach in which buyers don't pay for individual tracks. There may be some merit in such models, and "feeling free" certainly works well for Google even if its success in many other endeavours might be debatable. But "feels free" implies "ignorant of the cost", leaving Google and Facebook users acting surprised and offended whenever the data collection activities of these services are mentioned.
I've previously contemplated re-badging so-called "free content" as "ad-enabled content" to more accurately reflect the mechanism by which it is resourced. A harsher critic might suggest that "surveillance-enabled services" would make the message even balder. Either way, it's hard to see how data collection, corporate messaging and other annoyances can be addressed without confronting the business models by which the services in question are delivered.
