Of all the harms that online tracking by the advertising industry has done to individuals and to society, the greatest is the shambles it is making of democratic institutions. An article in The New York Times this week addressed my deepest fears about tracking, and how they are coming to life.
As we know, the worst governments in recent history were the ones that had state organs spying on the population: the Stasi, the KGB, the Gestapo.Until recently, the government in the US has been expressly prohibited from spying on its citizens. But the current love affair between the Trump administration and tech industry billionaires have made these prohibitions essentially moot.
According to The NY Times, “In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” This is the man who on Memorial Day called his political opponents ‘scum.’
According to the Brennan Center for Democracy, “Americans leave a trail of personal data with almost every action we take — every website visit, credit card payment, browser search, and online message generates data. Third parties like cell phone companies, internet service providers, social media platforms, and app developers collect and hold this information, often without our knowledge… This data also finds its way into exhaustive dossiers, compiled by data brokers, that reveal the most intimate details of our lives: our movements, habits, associations, health conditions, and ideologies.
...The lack of comprehensive data protection in the United States …have fostered…a shadow digital economy of platforms and third-party data brokers that collect and commodify users’ data. This underregulated data broker ecosystem, built to target consumers with ads, also engenders ever-increasing risks of… dragnet surveillance by government agencies that can acquire vast amounts of personal information without legal process.”
Tracking is anathema to democracy. It was bad enough when the adtech platforms had vast, secret files on every one of us. But now that the tech billionaires have crawled into bed with government squids, we are facing a unique crisis.
I don’t care what end of the political spectrum you are on, there is no model of democratic governance that can include a system in which we are being spied upon every minute of the day by government. The KGB, the Gestapo, the Stasi could only dream of having the depth of information about individuals that Google, Meta, Amazon, and X have. And if you think the heads of these companies have the balls to resist coercion from Washington you’re delusional.
It is hard to imagine that a business as silly as advertising can become an existential threat to a system of government. Maybe that’s why we have ignored the warning signals for so long. But time is running out. If we don’t put an end to tracking soon, we will regret it forever.
In politics there is no such thing as the future. All there is is the past re-inventing itself.
The Facebook Fraud Empire
