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Big brother asks for your ID (64)

The digital agora

The importance of the internet to our culture cannot be overstated. It offers us a common ground to share music, opinions, conduct transactions, learn, travel and many more. But crucially, it acts as a metaphor for a central square: it is our primary means of talking with each other and exchanging opinions on a mass scale.

This is very similar to the ancient Greek agora and the Roman forum. Our digital existence is almost synonymous with our public existence. Politicians address people via tweets, rallies or strikes are organized asynchronously via chatting and even companies mostly interact with customers or the public via the internet. This level of mass interaction can potentially enable a true representative democracy. Given then the importance of a healthy public life, we all understand it is very important to introduce clear rules of engagement to how we operate in our shared public spaces.

It shouldn't be possible for a single, anonymous lie to ruin one person's reputation. Disinformation or slander and hate speech shouldn't be given a platform. While these are broadly recognized norms their exact implementation has been hotly debated and it seems we are not sure where we want to place the needle between public control or self-regulation.

Protecting the young ... or watching us all?

The new development in this ongoing discussion has been the growing awareness of social media's impact on children. Now that adults are fully hooked to the internet, their kids will naturally copy this behaviour. The thought (and reality) of children with iPads is a nightmare for many people. But their worries do not stop at the decrease of outdoor activity or the pacification of the new generation. People are worried that their children will be exposed to adult content, to advertisers and addictive forms of interaction. A call for banning children from accessing these online services has been made.

And governments and tech companies answered the call. What is being proposed is a system to control the age of each user. And this can be done either by uploading a picture of one's ID or by more advanced means, which include an AI reviewing a user's history and determining one's age.

In general, we have to be very careful when the children argument is used. It is our moral duty to protect kids and thus it is easy to seem gross and evil when debating against measures that will make the world safer for the little ones. But it is our duty to examine what exactly is being traded-off here and if there is really no alternative.

The implications beyond the playground

At first, little seems likely to go wrong with this. After all, we are already used to showing our identification papers to the police at will. But the police is a public force, controlled by the government which in turn is elected by the people. A big tech company, on the other hand, is a private entity whose goal is profit. And these companies have a track record of hooking us to cheap engagement and wanting to mine our data.

But then again, big tech knows us too well already, right? So, what is their business plan for this transition? If we zoom out, I think we are seeing an expansion of big tech's reach. If a few organizations can guarantee the identity of users, then they can offer their services to governments or banks in the future. Anything from applying for a parking permit, requesting mortgages or even registering to voting lists could be funneled through these same systems, effectively making them the gatekeepers of basic civic participation 

We should pause and consider the consequences. This would give these big companies even more power over our lives. They will effectively have control over our commons: what purchase you can make, what content can be accessed, and in general who is and who is not. This might seem like a stretch given our current predicament. What would they have to gain by doing this? But then again, why would we actively encourage removing one more guard rail from our democracies?


 

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