We Are Datafied

After internet or more specifically social media become a part of your life, a real duality has emerged in the personality. Now there is a real you and another algorithmic “you.” Online, you live in a realm functionally distinct from the world you thought you knew: one where your data assigns you a gender different from your own, or a citizenship unlike the one in your passport.

In some cases, it’s easy to check out the algorithmic you. For example, there is a plug-in Citizen-Ex developed by UK artist James Bridle uses your browser’s metadata to calculate your algorithmic citizenship—and the answer might surprise you. National citizenship is normally seen as binary: You either are, or are not, a citizen of a country.

But Bridle’s plug-in assigns you a percentage-based citizenship where for example you can be 44.8% Indian, 43.7% American, 10% British,1.49% Pakistani, and even 0.01% Bangladeshi, as I currently am.

I say “currently” because our algorithmic selves alter minute by minute and byte to byte depending on how we’re using the internet. Last night, after chatting with friends living in England, you might have skewed British. This morning, chatting to your cousin in USA you might have tilted to USA.

This is citizenship by algorithm.

Citizenship is one of the battlegrounds of the 21st Century, a century which will see increasing conflicts over territory and resources, as the previous consensus of nation states falls apart; people, jobs, labour and information become more mobile; and climate change causes ever greater stress on the environment, agriculture and industry. Where you are allowed to travel, work and live, already the most important questions for much of the world's population, will come to affect more and more of us.

At the same time, all of us are becoming more international, even post-national, because of the technology we use, and the ways those technologies, and our societies, are designed. Networks, corporations and social groups bridge nations and continents; we may feel more allegiance to, and kinship with, people in distant parts of the world than with our next door neighbors. In this we all resemble migrants, for whom citizenship has always been contested, provisional, and precarious.

Algorithmic Citizenship is both a potential threat and a possible solution to many of the issues that our allegiances and rights, guaranteed by traditional citizenship, face in the 21st Century. Used against us, it renders us effectively stateless and without protection, destabilising and destroying the legal protections which keep us from aggression, death, and invasions of all kinds. Properly accounted for, understood, and deployed in the service of citizens themselves, it may strengthen our ability to work and live together, to enact true democracies, and to protect the weak as well as the strong.

You can check out what gender and age Google thinks you are based on your search queries and website visits by clicking http://citizen-ex.com/citizenship.

But be prepared: Google’s algorithmic gender and age identifications will probably seem wrong. (For example, you might be a 30-year-old woman, but Google thinks you’re a 65-year-old man.) This “error” actually has nothing to do with your real age or gender because Google is measuring something completely separate from the human notion of identity. These models are created by categorizing certain search terms and websites and then parsing our data to determine what algorithmically fits or doesn’t. So if you’re a woman who is algorithmically interpreted as a man, that merely means you’re more closely aligned to Google’s model of a man than a woman.

Because algorithms draw from our data, not our lived experience, it largely doesn’t matter if we’re incorrectly identified. (And as much as it sometimes may seem, Google is not invested in explicitly maintaining the patriarchy.) Instead, Google wants to provide advertisers with a consumer base of users who are seen to be profitably man-ish. Similarly, the NSA really doesn’t care if a user is citizen or foreigner, as algorithmic citizenship itself is only a legal caveat that protects them from constitutional overstepping.

But it still raises the question: What would the real world look like if users were identified based only on their algorithmic self?

This is already happening to some extent. Google’s gender and age audience analytics determine which users are targeted with content and advertisements, as well as how websites interpret who is visiting their site. For example, if your data suggests you’re algorithmically wealthy, you might be shown higher prices for hotels or flights on a site like Orbitz.com, because your data suggests you can pay.

A life algorithmically ordered and reordered often beyond our comprehension ushers us into a dangerous terrain of lopsided knowledge. On this plane, users have little to no idea how they are defined, but commercial firms and governmental agencies use our data to determine privacy rights, targeted content, plane-ticket prices, and our position in society. As humans continue to produce increasing amounts of mineable information, who we are as data might soon become more important than who we are as people.

There’s you—the real-life you—and there’s “you” online, as defined by algorithms that track every digital step you take and, depending on the data collected, assign your gender, age, educational level, and more. Few aspects of this “scary and intriguing” situation, as author Cheney-Lippold in his book ‘We Are Data’ quite properly calls it, are overlooked in his debut, a heady and rewarding exploration of our lives in the data age. “Online you are not who you think you are,” he writes. Instead, based on information “observed, recorded, analyzed, and stored” in a database, your life is assigned “categorical meaning,” whether by Google, a government agency, or any number of marketers: you are deemed unreliable, or a celebrity, or whatever, without your knowledge or any regard for who you really are. Thus you are “datafied” into computable data, which is used (by those with the power to do so) to “market, surveil, or control us.” Furthermore, your datafied identity is ever changing, depending on your latest online clicks. “Data holds no significance by itself—it has to be made useful,” writes the author. “We are thus made subject not to our data but to interpretations of that data.” Drawing on the work of a mind-boggling array of specialists, including philosophers, digital theorists, historians, legal scholars, anthropologists, queer theorists, and political scientists, Cheney-Lippold explores how companies and governments use our datafied identities in marketing, predictive policing, and in such matters as race and citizenship. His discussions of privacy in such a world—and of the fact that we are “not individuals online; we are dividuals”—will fascinate and unnerve many. In complex, thoroughly researched chapters, the author explains how this ceaseless interpretation of data by organizations that find it useful for their own purposes is setting the parameters for our present and future lives.

So, it is very clear that in case we are using internet and more specially the social media, our entire privacy is under the threat. By privacy we mean everything : love, friendship, criminality, citizenship, and even celebrity have been datafied by algorithms we rarely know about. These proprietary ideas about the world are not open for debate, made social and available to public. They are assigned from behind a private enclosure, a discursive trebuchet that assails us with meaning like rabble outside the mansion walls.

The consequences of this privatization means that privacy has become inverted, not in its definition but in its participants and circumstances. A site like OkCupid has privacy from us but we do not have the privacy from OkCupid ! We do not even know how our data is being used. We can not peek inside its compatibility match algorithm but every little thing we do can be watched and datafied. In fact via the terms of service for a site like FaceBook, not only do we not have privacy, but our data (our fotos, videos, even chats) does not belongs to us ! data, more often than not, belongs to whoever holds it in the cloud. The semantic resemblance of privacy and privatization can be twisted together, a slippery neoliberal convergence by which the two concepts almost eagerly folds into one. So, the cyberspace is privatized and it became business space, its business model become advertising, its advertising got targeted, and its targets were built with this possessed data. And the data gathered in these private spaces became the constant capital by which profit would be produced, echoing the most basic of the capital relations : we legally agree to turn over our data to owners, those owners use that data for profit, and the profit lets a company gather even more data to make even more profit.

People have started realising this fear world-over. Earlier this month,  American industry body  New Media Alliiance (NMA), which represents nearly 2,000 media outlets, including some of the world’s most influential publishers in the world, wrote to the US Congress demanding anti-trust exemption so they could collectively bargain with Facebook and Google. It is a significant step and one that caps long simmering tensions between the news media and such platforms, which have increasingly come to dominate user time and digital dollars.

Google and Facebook have now become even more pervasive in our daily lives, their influence continues to increase. For example, it is estimated that nearly 70 per cent of all digital revenue in the US is accounted for by the two. In India, no authentic figures are available but sources indicate it to be around 60 per cent. I do not say with confidence that the Anti Trust move will affect the datafication process and its possible impact on our lives but surely it is an alarming bell .