4 - Designing Data-Extractive Technologies

Summary

Through a long campaign to inculcate corporate-friendly discourses about privacy, the information industry tilted our legal consciousness away from privacy and enlisted even those employees who see themselves as privacy advocates in their data-extractive missions. This softened the discursive ground on which we think and talk about privacy and weakened the privacy laws we manage to pass. Technology companies then took advantage of public-private partnerships explicitly built into those privacy laws to undermine their effectiveness. They used coercive bureaucracies and took advantage of power asymmetries to develop compliance programs that reoriented and recast privacy laws in ways that served their surveillant interests. As a result, the information industry undermined the institutions that are supposed to protect our privacy.