Data privacy is in the news these days, with edge providers—notably Facebook and Google—having been cast in the villain role and we—everyone who uses the Internet— as the helpless damsel they’ve tied to the railroad of the Internet. The media have been quite gleeful in their cheering of Facebook’s recent bad news.
It’s good that there is a newfound focus on data privacy— but we’re picking on the wrong bad guys. Telecom companies —AT&T, Verizon, Comcast—have access to more of our data and treat it with nowhere near the scruples that Silicon Valley does.
Telecom companies are the gatekeepers of the Internet, monitoring and influencing our behavior via cell phones, cable and satellite TV, and Internet browsing. Their revenue from traditional advertising revenue has been in a constant state of decline, so they’re eager to get into the digital advertising space that Google and Facebook dominate. And they’ll use any means necessary: stealing our data, selling it, and bullying competitors with regulation.
With so much attention on Silicon Valley, Big Telecom has been free to get their hooks into us without much scrutiny. For example, Verizon has updated its privacy policy to allow it to scan its Internet users’ emails to facilitate targeted advertising. AT&T can follow users’ location, record their browsing history, and monitor what they’re watching online. AT&T can track a user’s journey from seeing an ad online, to searching for it, then purchasing it from a brick-and-mortar retail store by monitoring their location. Moreover, AT&T, Verizon, and other carriers have been selling user data to third parties for years, while Facebook has never done that.
We don’t even need a Black Mirror episode about this stuff, it’s already happening.
Telecoms get ignored while edge providers get pilloried for a variety of reasons—one is that end-users think about Facebook and Google almost every time they go online, but they rarely think about AT&T or Verizon. (Comcast gets a lot of hate on reddit, of course.) Telecoms are happy to take advantage of this to wage war against Silicon Valley, both in the public and behind the scenes with their much greater institutional Washington knowledge and army of lobbyists.
Telecoms have had Silicon Valley envy for 15 years, according to an expert recently quoted in The Verge, who said, “The ways they’ve manifested that envy is to try to get them regulated and to try and beat back regulations like net neutrality that might be helpful to Silicon Valley.”
Earlier this year, AT&T started a push for its “Internet Bill of Rights,” which sounds innocuous but was a new form of net neutrality and privacy regulations in disguise. The “Bill of Rights” would over-regulate Google and Facebook while doing nothing to buttress consumers against telecom’s privacy intrusions. Criticizing the irony of this move, the American Enterprise Institute called it “corporate jiu jitsu” and pointed out that “regulating the web would certainly provide aid and comfort to those who turn the megaplatforms into public utilities or even nationalize them.”
Tech Crunch was a little harsher, noting that “What AT&T is trying to do here is put all Internet companies in the same bag, bringing down regulations on a hated rival (edge providers) just after escaping the regulations placed on its own industry.”
Facebook and Google have done so much for the world that it’s easy to take them for granted or focus only on their shortcomings. Social media didn’t sabotage the 2016 election, but it did help catch the Boston Marathon bombers. TED Talks unofficial motto for 2018 is “Ugh, Facebook,” but how many millions of views does it owe to Facebook? Everyone who uses Gmail or Facebook knows that they are parleying a small amount of privacy for a huge convenience. We’ve always known that. Facebook is making a good-faith effort to repair its relationship with its users, which every social media platform can’t say. Twitter kicked 143,000 apps off its platform but hasn’t even explained why!
The shady dealings of telecom companies with our data are much better hidden. Edge providers aren’t the ones harvesting our information and selling out our privacy like we’re nothing more than green lines of code from The Matrix.
When Facebook and Google hear about customer dissatisfaction, they change their policies and make public apologies. Telecoms respond by upping their lobbying game to put pressure on policymakers in private. Facebook and Google aren’t really moustache-twirling villains, but the telecom companies are the train that’ll run us over.
