WHAT, ME WORRY?

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal, it’s no secret that our movements are being tracked and our purchases analyzed. But, given that the targeted ads we receive are so wildly off the mark, is it time we all calm down?

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal, it’s no secret that our movements are being tracked and our purchases analyzed. But, given that the targeted ads we receive are so wildly off the mark, is it time we all calm down?

Once upon a time, smoke in an airplane cabin was normal, people mailed letters written in cursive, and paranoia was largely reserved for lunatics. There was some paranoia, sure, but it was simpler. Even if you believed your phone was tapped, no problem— stay off the phone and you’re golden.

No more. These days all the best-dressed people are wearing tinfoil hats. If you’re not paranoid, the thinking goes, you’re not paying attention. It’s all about social media—our movements and habits are being tracked, our thoughts manipulated by online intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic. Every click, every like, fastens you more tightly into the world wide web of surveillance. Look closer at that Instagram photo of an adorable kitten and the picture gradually dissolves into bits of data—an illusion, like your belief in free will. It’s the Matrix, man. We’re all puppets.

I’ve always been a little slow when it comes to adopting technology. So maybe I need to update my fear settings. But I am not particularly concerned about privacy issues. It’s weird, really—why am I not worried? Could it be that targeted microwaves have switched off the suspicious portions of my brain?

Always a possibility. But I like to think there are other reasons for my lack of paranoia. One is simply what I see on my computer every day—whatever sinister forces are attempting to manipulate me seem to be doing a remarkably shabby job of it. The larger reason is that, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I believe we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Almost nothing, anyway.

Concern about social media privacy is playing out on two levels: the personal and the political. Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the personal information of 87 million Facebook accounts while working for the Trump campaign and other clients. Facebook has suffered a plunging stock price and a flood of departures. (A report by Edison Research shows 2018 to be the first year that fewer Americans have reported using Facebook, down from 67 per cent of those polled to 62 per cent.) U.S. special prosecutor Robert Mueller has already issued indictments of Russian operatives who are charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential race by spreading misinformation.

Poor old Facebook is looking desperate. Last week my Facebook page popped up an online survey: Steve, we’d like to do better. Please agree or disagree with the following statement: Facebook is good for the world. a) strongly agree, b) agree, c) neither agree nor disagree, d) disagree, e) strongly disagree.

It reminded me of the HAL 9000 computer pleading for its life as astronaut Dave Bowman disables it: “Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you should sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over .... ”

So the concerns are twofold: one, that modern technology and social media channels are spying on you, selling your information, and attempting to influence your personal behaviour; and, two, that unscrupulous social media campaigns are affecting society by spreading lies and seeking to pervert democracy.

Some of the outrage over the Cambridge Analytica story is about ethics. No argument there—Facebook should not have allowed unscrupulous political operatives to access personal information. It was creepy and wrong. But while I don’t question the anger, I wonder about the level of public fear and mistrust these stories seem to have created. What is it exactly that people are afraid of ?

My own lack of concern springs mostly from my personal experience. I am told Big Social Media is watching me like a spider in the corner. But as master manipulators go, they are, as the Brits say, not much cop.

My Facebook page recently featured an ad for hearing aids. OK, I get it, I am no longer a young man, but otherwise a swing and a miss. For a while I started getting all my ads in French, perhaps because I had been to France. Whenever I search for hotels online, the hotels I looked at start popping up in my feed. Well, thanks, but I already found them. Even weirder, after I book a hotel in a particular city I will often see a flood of ads for hotels in the same city. How do these artificial brains think travel usually works? A mad dash around several hotel rooms, trying to collect as many mini-soaps and shampoo packets as possible?

Targeted ads often seem less like sinister mind control and more like mindless parroting of recent online activity. The approach was recently summed up by author Jacqueline Raynor, who tweeted: “Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them.

I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I’m not going to think, Oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I’ll treat myself.”

Nor are searches always reflective of personality or needs. As a freelance journalist I am googling all manner of random topics. Sometimes I am googling facts just so I can make a joke on Twitter. A pointillist portrait of me drawn from my searches would show a very odd-looking beast indeed.

Responsive technologies are no better at understanding me. I acquired a Mac computer a couple of years ago. As soon as I booted up each morning, notifications bloomed, telling me just what to expect in the day to come: meetings, events, weather. At least the weather part was useful. But the rest of it was a mystery. What were these important meetings? What were these pressing events? Who ever said I was interested in any of it?

Eventually I realized that my Mac was connecting to Facebook and taking on faith that I had said “yes” to every single event or obscure club meeting that any of my Facebook acquaintances had posted or suggested for me. I changed the settings. Now I am reliably informed every day that I have no meetings or events scheduled for this week. Luckily I don’t need a computer to tell me to get out of bed—my Mac would offer no pressing reasons. If it were able to remind me that I had arranged a dinner outing with a friend via email it might actually be helpful, impressive, and upon further contemplation disturbing. But it can’t. My computer is not exactly the all-seeing eye of Sauron.

My Mac did give me access to Siri, which I was genuinely excited about. I had fun making her/it recite “Bohemian Rhapsody” and give funny answers to particular questions like “What does Siri mean?” (Answer: “It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma tied up in a pretty ribbon of obfuscation.”), and “Do you have any pets?” (Answer: “I have an anteater who eats bugs.”). But after that? Siri is merely voice-activated Google. And unless my fingers are smeared with cake batter—which to date they have never been—typing in search words myself is more efficient.

So my computer is a bit like Donald Trump. It tries, but the poor thing seems far too stupid to be an effective tyrant.

Our phones are another tool in Big Brother’s surveillance regime. Recent media reports have revealed the shocking extent to which phones can track our movements. This is not news to regular viewers of shows like NBC News Dateline and 48 Hours on CBS—we are well aware that many a murderous path has been traced by cellphones pinging off various towers on the way to and from the victim’s home or out to the spot where the body was found. I would like to think that if I was planning a murder or disposing of a body I wouldn’t be stupid enough to take my phone along, but to be fair there are always those impulsive spur-of-the-moment killings when it’s really too late to disable your location setting.

Your phone tracks you. It’s unsettling. The question is, what nefarious purpose does such tracking serve? Because the business of online companies like Facebook and Google is selling advertising, it seems safe to assume that your location and your general travel habits are being used to supply targeted ads to your feed. Information about your whereabouts is being sold to third parties. As the saying goes, if you are getting a product for free then you are the product.

But is that what really worries people? Are they frightened by the prospect of targeted marketing so persuasive that they will be helpless to resist? Will harvesting and selling my data compel me to buy those hearing aids Facebook pitched me last week, or three more toilet seats?

I think the real fear lies elsewhere—a vague, frightening sense that this information will be put to other uses, in particular by the government. It is, some believe, a series of steps down the slippery slope to total authoritarian control of our lives.

Here it might be useful to point out how authoritarian governments tend to handle social media sites. Typically, they ban them. If you have

been to China you know that trying to log in to Facebook is futile, and that Google is also unavailable. Safe to say anyone capable of accessing international social media sites from North Korea is doing so with the drapes drawn and doors barricaded. After the 2009 elections in Iran, Facebook was banned because activists were using it to organize. Subsequent popular uprisings were revealed to the outside world largely through video clips sent to Facebook users outside that country. When protests rocked the streets of Egypt, Facebook was blocked.

That’s the flip side of all this information sharing. Yes, sites gather your information for advertisers but users gain access to far more information than they give up. Plus they gain a means of widespread communication that tends to work against government control rather than for it.

Of course, Iranian elections are not the ones people are discussing these days. Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote is accepted by all but the most partisan of observers, and the fabricated news stories churned out by various troll farms have created the frightening sense that our entire media landscape has become a poisoned well. There is no doubt that irresponsible social media accounts have made the truth more difficult to pick out amid the noise.

Following recent shootings in Parkland High School in Florida and at the YouTube headquarters in California, Twitter was flooded with maliciously misleading bulletins. These incidents are genuinely disturbing and it is legitimate (if perhaps a little optimistic) to press for improvements in how Twitter and Facebook handle such trolls.

But what is the ultimate effect of so-called “fake news”? Are bogus news stories really changing minds or just playing to existing prejudices?

When Donald Trump became president a lot of people naturally looked around for explanations. How could it have happened? Blame was placed on Russian meddling and “fake news” (that is, the kind of fake news Trump likes, as opposed to CNN reporting unpleasant facts about him).

But consider the campaign. Donald Trump committed so many outrages and said so many things that were previously considered disqualifying that it is impossible to keep track of them all. He sneered at John McCain, a former prisoner of war who had been a Republican presidential candidate himself, saying that he did not respect captured soldiers. He mocked a disabled reporter, called for violence against protesters, and even refused to confirm that he would accept the results of the election he was running in. Then, just weeks before the election, he was heard on a recording describing one earnest but failed attempt to cheat on his wife and boasting about his ability to commit sexual assault with impunity. Nothing comparable had ever emerged about any presidential candidate, Bill Clinton included. It was the audio equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster, and it was not from some bogus Facebook clip or fringe conspiracy radio show. This was not “fake news.” It was on every channel and in every newspaper, reported without exaggeration because, well, why gild the lily?

And several weeks after the tape was released, more than 62 million Americans shrugged and voted for the man anyway—perhaps even because of it, in a few sad cases. Donald Trump did not become President because of fake news. He won the election because a large section of the American electorate decided he was their best choice to become the next leader of the world’s most powerful country. Changing your Facebook settings won’t change that.

Fake news stories are really just unlabelled and unscrupulous political advertising. Only the delivery systems are new. Ugly political slurs were once distributed through leaflets and phone calls and even through TV ads; now they reach far more people, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. The smear campaigns still play to people’s innate prejudices.

Much of this fancy 21st-century paranoia is no different from the old-school analogue version. When I was young there were people who spoke seriously about how Russia was controlling the weather. These days, I am reliably informed by some, the government is changing the weather via “chemtrails.” Conspiracy-mongers of the worst kind have become media titans simply by invoking knee-jerk arguments about how the victims of some attack or disaster actually set it up themselves to gain sympathy. Personally, if I were a sinister, all-powerful entity, I would magically appear to everyone who spoke the words “false flag” and make their tongues disappear.

Vague fears of unseen forces controlling our destinies are as old as humanity. The Devil, demons, witches, the incubus, the succubus, fairies, the CIA, Facebook, Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica. All pretty scary. But what would Cambridge Analytica have learned from my Facebook profile? I dislike Donald Trump. I make wisecracks. I like cats and flowers. As annoyed as I might be at Facebook for selling me out to those slime bags, I’m reasonably OK with having those facts get around. I don’t take quizzes, I don’t sign petitions, I don’t care to find out which “Golden Girl” I am. I hang with online friends, and they hang with me.

There’s a libertarian argument to be made that violating your privacy is wrong regardless of what use is being made of your personal details. But then, no one is forcing you to live on the social media grid. If it truly disturbs you then sign out, as many have recently done.

Personally, I am far more concerned about rampant paranoia than social media. Paranoia is corrosive. It eats away at the bonds of society. When Alex Jones and Sean Hannity and their ilk tell you to be afraid, I say remember the words of FDR, with perhaps a small paraphrase—the only thing we have to fear is the fear-mongers themselves.

Is it too late to float a new slogan: Facebook and chill?

I am told Big Social Media is watching me like a spider in the corner.