The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [57]
Rather than housing their Web sites and databases internally, many businesses and start-ups now run on virtual computers in vast server farms managed by other companies. The enormous pool of computing power and storage these networked machines create is known as the cloud, and it allows clients much greater flexibility. If your business runs in the cloud, you don’t need to buy more hardware when your processing demands expand: You just rent a greater portion of the cloud. Amazon Web Services, one of the major players in the space, hosts thousands of Web sites and Web servers and undoubtedly stores the personal data of millions. On one hand, the cloud gives every kid in his or her basement access to nearly unlimited computing power to quickly scale up a new online service. On the other, as Clive Thompson pointed out to me, the cloud “is actually just a handful of companies.” When Amazon booted the activist Web site WikiLeaks off its servers under political pressure in 2010, the site immediately collapsed—there was nowhere to go.
Personal data stored in the cloud is also actually much easier for the government to search than information on a home computer. The FBI needs a warrant from a judge to search your laptop. But if you use Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail for your e-mail, you “lose your constitutional protections immediately,” according to a lawyer for the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The FBI can just ask the company for the information—no judicial paperwork needed, no permission required—as long as it can argue later that it’s part of an “emergency.” “The cops will love this,” says privacy advocate Robert Gellman about cloud computing. “They can go to a single place and get everybody’s documents.”
Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they’re so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. When the Justice Department requested billions of search records from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in 2006, the three companies quickly complied. (Google, to its credit, opted to fight the request.) Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who worked at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, says that Google at one point housed three officers of “an unnamed intelligence agency” at its headquarters in Mountain View. And Google and the CIA have invested together in a firm called Recorded Future, which focuses on using data connections to predict future real-world events.
Even if the consolidation of this data-power doesn’t result in more governmental control, it’s worrisome on its own terms.
One of the defining traits of the new personal information environment is that it’s asymmetrical. As Jonathan Zittrain argues in The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It, “nowadays, an individual must increasingly give information about himself to large and relatively faceless institutions, for handling and use by strangers—unknown, unseen, and all too frequently, unresponsive.”
In a small town or an apartment building with paper-thin walls, what I know about you is roughly the same as what you know about me. That’s a basis for a social contract, in which we’ll deliberately ignore some of what we know. The new privacyless world does away with that contract. I can know a lot about you without your knowing I know. “There’s an implicit bargain in our behavior,” search expert John Battelle told me, “that we haven’t done the math on.”
If Sir Francis Bacon is right that “knowledge is power,” privacy proponent Viktor Mayer-Schonberger writes that what we’re witnessing now is nothing less than a “redistribution of information power from the powerless to the powerful.” It’d be one thing if we all knew everything about each other. It’s another when centralized entities know a lot more about us than we know about each other—and sometimes, more than we know about ourselves. If