The Privacy Paradox: Government Regulation and the Erosion of Technological Transparency
By: Jordan Eshpeter
Tags: Transparency, Facebook, Gdpr, Tech Ethics, Privacy

Photo by ev on Unsplash

The era of self-regulation for the technology industry appears to be over. In its place, a series of new government regulations are being implemented. The European Union (EU) introduced its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 to ensure appropriate levels of privacy for its citizens and transparency from technology companies. More recently, industry leaders have advocated for similar standards to be applied globally. The issue for technology companies, practitioners, and users is that transparency and privacy are highly subjective terms that can serve contradictory ends.

Technology companies with valuable intellectual property and lofty growth targets are motivated to maintain narrow definitions of transparency and privacy. The more user data they can collect, utilize, and monetize the better. In a self-regulated environment, these companies have created their own transparency and privacy policies, signalled their virtuosity by publishing reports (see “Our Continued Commitment to Transparency”), and faced little consequence if any for policy violations. As such, a generation of technology companies has achieved hyper growth while their innovations and business models outpaced the law and lawmakers. If not from within, effective regulation must come from without.

Users of technology products, on the other hand, hold much broader definitions of transparency and privacy. Some want to know how their personal data is used by a company, how it affects content or features they’re exposed to or the rationale for decisions made about them by automated systems. However, the rights of users have been opaque and their options for recourse uncertain. This is changing, however, with the GDPR. Through it, the EU has introduced broad rights for users (e.g., rights to an explanation and to human intervention). At least in Europe, the lawmakers are catching up.

The technology industry has been quick to respond. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, published an op-ed in the Washington Post (see “The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas”) where he implored lawmakers to introduce a “globally harmonized framework” and stated that it would be “good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework”. Perhaps surprisingly, Facebook is leading the charge to regulate the internet.

Then, at the recent Facebook F8 conference, Zuckerberg declared, “The future is private”. At the conference, he showcased the vision of privacy-focused Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram products. To achieve this level of privacy, Facebook is redesigning its products with end-to-end encryption. Paradoxically, this positive orientation towards privacy has a correspondingly negative effect on transparency. Rather than newly transparent, the next generation of Facebook products will be completely opaque to users, regulators, and within Facebook itself.

Facebook’s call for internet regulation and their pivot towards privacy-focused products introduces at least three ethical dilemmas. With end-to-end encryption, Facebook absolves itself of any moral responsibility for the content and messages distributed within its platform and avoids the legal complication of being classified as a media company. Further, end-to-end encryption means that core components of Facebook’s products and their data remain out-of-reach of GDPR-like regulation and its requirement for transparency. Finally, as technology companies and governments are busy outwitting each other, users remain without applicable regulations and actionable rights. If the future is private, it will be even less transparent.