Is it time to rein in our devil-may-care attitude to online privacy?
I was in my early 20s when someone took me into the corner of a local newsroom and pointed at the internet. There it was, sat flashing in the corner – a gleaming cyber coalface.
Are you protecting your digital footprint?
I was a wannabe journalist who didn’t know a jpeg from a clothes peg. But because I was young, they asked me to “have a fiddle around on that and see what it does”. Innocent times.
User-generated content was a letter to the editor and blogging was essentially the preserve of the self-obsessed and the insane – aka the columnist.
But since then, we’ve gone squirrels for the connected world. We openly throw our digital selves into the ether for the judgement of strangers.
The newspapers on which I worked are now bursting with misguided monologues powered by the social networks we’ve come to call home. Our user names, profile pictures, likes and dislikes – all handed over for the appraisal of others.
Now, it may surprise you that as a middle-aged, white, middle-class bloke, my curated self is a dull affair. Look at my social footprint and you’ll conclude I love pictures of animals wearing clothes, The Stone Roses and my kids. Probably in that order.
It’s a broad-brush profile of the ‘digital me’, without any kind of nuance or context. But I get to choose with whom I share this vacuous nonsense. So, lucky them, right?
However, in the new digital economy, why have so many of our digital details become so prescriptive for the most menial of transactions?
This week, a study from three US universities suggests that ride-hailing companies Uber, Lyft and Flywheel may allegedly discriminate against black people and women. The researchers took nearly 1,500 rides in Seattle and Boston, gathering data from the three taxi-hailing companies.
Black riders faced longer wait times and more cancellations than white riders, while women were more likely to be overcharged and taken on longer routes.
This discrimination, although abhorrent, is symptomatic of a new era where we feel compelled to proffer our digital selves without thought of the consequences. Just because it’s commerce, doesn’t mean we won’t be scrutinised by the very services that we employ.
Of course, this data contributes to some important personal safety measures in a peer-to-peer economy. But those same details that supposedly protect us can also work against us. Don’t like the look of my face or the sound of my name? Then, you can opt out of serving me.
It’s the online equivalent of, wandering into a cab office and being told “we don’t serve your lot in here”. But without the awkward silence and the inevitable fighting. We happily vomit our details into these new digital distribution businesses with little thought of how this data will be used to screen ourselves.
When Amber Rudd announced a plan to force companies to disclose how many foreign workers they employ, the internet went postal. How very dare they? But as soon as we want to hire an Uber or rent an Airbnb, we lob our personal data down the nearest server with devil-may-care abandon.
When did we become so compliant? We hand over our name, email address, postcode and mugshots as part of the terms of service. And after all that, we even allow ourselves to be judged by the brands in question. Whether that be our digital star rating – mine’s 4.67, in case you’re asking, and I’m livid about it – or our gender and ethnicity.
None of this discrimination is excusable, but perhaps we should stop flashing our digital smalls at anyone who asks and be less accepting of these seemingly endless data requests.
We should be more protective of our digital selves in this evolving online economy. And that includes my pictures of dogs wearing Stone Roses t-shirts. It’s the little things, don’t you know?