{"id":14189,"date":"2019-02-10T04:19:53","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T04:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/is-europe-closing-in-on-an-antitrust-fix-for-surveillance-technologists.html"},"modified":"2019-02-10T04:19:53","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T04:19:53","slug":"is-europe-closing-in-on-an-antitrust-fix-for-surveillance-technologists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/is-europe-closing-in-on-an-antitrust-fix-for-surveillance-technologists.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The German Federal Cartel Office\u2019s decision<\/a>\u00a0to order Facebook to change how it processes users\u2019 personal data this week is a sign the antitrust tide could at last be turning against platform power.<\/p>\n

One European Commission <\/a> source we spoke to, who was commenting in a personal capacity, described it as \u201cclearly pioneering\u201d and \u201ca big deal\u201d, even without Facebook being fined a dime.<\/p>\n

The FCO\u2019s decision instead bans the social network from linking user data across different platforms it owns, unless it gains people\u2019s consent (nor can it make use of its services contingent on such consent). Facebook <\/a> is also prohibited from gathering and linking data on users from third party websites, such as via its tracking pixels and social plugins.<\/p>\n

The order is not yet in force, and Facebook is appealing, but should it come into force the social network faces being de facto shrunk by having its platforms siloed at the data level.<\/p>\n

To comply with the order Facebook would have to ask users to freely consent to being data-mined \u2014 which the company does not do at present.<\/p>\n

Yes, Facebook could still manipulate the outcome it wants<\/a>\u00a0from users but doing so would open it to further challenge under EU data protection law, as its current approach to consent is already being challenged<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The EU\u2019s updated privacy framework,\u00a0GDPR<\/a>, requires consent to be specific, informed and freely given. That standard supports challenges to Facebook\u2019s (still fixed) entry \u2018price\u2019 to its social services. To play you still have to agree to hand over your personal data so it can sell your attention to advertisers. But legal experts contend<\/a> that\u2019s neither privacy by design nor default.<\/p>\n

The only \u2018alternative\u2019 Facebook offers is to tell users they can delete their account. Not that doing so would stop the company from tracking you around the rest of the mainstream web anyway. Facebook\u2019s tracking infrastructure is also embedded across the wider Internet so it profiles\u00a0non-users too<\/a>.<\/p>\n

EU data protection regulators are still investigating a very large number of consent-related GDPR complaints.<\/p>\n

But the German FCO, which said it liaised with privacy authorities during its investigation of Facebook\u2019s data-gathering, has dubbed this type of behavior \u201cexploitative abuse\u201d, having also deemed the social service to hold a monopoly position in the German market.<\/p>\n

So there are now two lines of legal attack \u2014 antitrust and privacy law \u2014 threatening Facebook (and indeed other adtech companies\u2019) surveillance-based business model across Europe.<\/p>\n

A year ago<\/a> the German antitrust authority also announced a probe of the online advertising sector, responding to concerns about a lack of transparency in the\u00a0market. Its work here is by no means done.<\/p>\n

Data limits<\/h2>\n

The lack of a big flashy fine attached to the German FCO\u2019s order against Facebook makes this week\u2019s story less of a major headline than recent European Commission antitrust fines handed to Google <\/a> \u2014 such as the record-breaking\u00a0$5BN penalty<\/a>\u00a0issued last summer for anticompetitive behaviour linked to the Android mobile platform.<\/p>\n

But the decision is arguably just as, if not more<\/em>,\u00a0significant, because of the structural remedies being ordered upon Facebook. These remedies have been likened to an internal break-up of the company \u2014 with enforced internal separation of its multiple platform products at the data level.<\/p>\n

This of course runs counter to (ad) platform giants\u2019 preferred trajectory, which has long been to tear modesty walls down<\/a>; pool user data from multiple internal (and indeed external sources<\/a>), in defiance of the notion of informed consent; and mine all that personal (and sensitive) stuff to build identity-linked profiles to train algorithms that predict (and,\u00a0some contend, manipulate<\/a>) individual behavior.<\/p>\n

Because if you can predict what a person is going to do you can choose which advert to serve to increase the chance they\u2019ll click. (Or as Mark Zuckerberg puts it: \u2018Senator, we run ads<\/a>.\u2019)<\/p>\n

This means that a regulatory intervention that interferes with an ad tech giant\u2019s ability to pool and process personal data starts to look really interesting. Because a Facebook that can\u2019t join data dots across its sprawling social empire \u2014 or indeed across the mainstream web \u2014 wouldn\u2019t be such a massive giant in terms of data insights. And nor, therefore, surveillance oversight.<\/p>\n

Each of its platforms would be forced to be a more discrete (and, well, discreet) kind of business.<\/p>\n

Competing against data-siloed platforms with a common owner \u2014 instead of a single interlinked mega-surveillance-network \u2014 also starts to\u00a0sound almost possible. It suggests a\u00a0playing field that\u2019s reset, if not entirely levelled.<\/p>\n

(Whereas, in the case of Android, <\/a> the European Commission did not order any specific remedies \u2014 allowing Google to come up with \u2018fixes\u2019 itself; and so to shape the most self-serving \u2018fix\u2019<\/a> it can think of.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, just look at where Facebook is now aiming\u00a0to get to: A technical unification of the backend of its different social products<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such a merger would collapse even more walls and fully enmesh platforms that started life as entirely separate products before were folded into Facebook\u2019s empire (also, let\u2019s not forget, via surveillance-informed<\/a>\u00a0acquisitions).<\/p>\n

\n

Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Facebook\u2019s plan to unify its products on a single backend platform looks very much like an attempt to throw up technical barriers to antitrust hammers. It\u2019s at least harder to imagine breaking up a company if its multiple, separate products are merged onto one unified backend which functions to cross and combine data streams.<\/p>\n

Set against Facebook\u2019s sudden desire to technically unify its full-flush of dominant social networks (Facebook Messenger; <\/a> Instagram; <\/a> WhatsApp) is a rising drum-beat of calls for competition-based scrutiny of tech giants.<\/p>\n

This has been building for years, as the market power \u2014 and even democracy-denting potential \u2014 of surveillance capitalism\u2019s data giants has telescoped into view<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Calls to break up tech giants no longer carry a suggestive punch. Regulators are routinely asked whether it\u2019s time. As the European Commission\u2019s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, <\/a> was when she handed down Google\u2019s latest massive antitrust fine last summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her response then was that she wasn\u2019t sure breaking Google up is the right answer \u2014 preferring to try remedies that might allow competitors to have a go, while also emphasizing the importance of legislating to ensure \u201ctransparency and fairness in the business to platform relationship\u201d.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s interesting that the idea of breaking up tech giants now plays so well as political theatre, suggesting that wildly successful consumer technology companies \u2014 which have long dined out on shiny convenience-based marketing claims, made ever so saccharine sweet via the lure of \u2018free\u2019 services \u2014 have lost a big chunk of their populist pull, dogged as they have been by so many scandals.<\/p>\n

From terrorist content and hate speech, to election interference, child exploitation, bullying, abuse. There\u2019s also the matter of\u00a0how they arrange their tax affairs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The public perception of tech giants has matured as the \u2018costs\u2019 of their \u2018free\u2019 services have scaled into view. The upstarts have also become the establishment. People see not a new generation of \u2018cuddly capitalists\u2019 but another bunch of multinationals; highly polished but remote money-making machines that take rather more than they give back to the societies they feed off.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s trick of naming each Android iteration after a different sweet treat makes for an interesting parallel to the (also now shifting) public perceptions around sugar, following closer attention to health concerns. What does its sickly sweetness mask? And after the sugar tax, we now have politicians\u00a0calling for a social media levy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just this week<\/a> the deputy leader of the main opposition party in the UK called for setting up a standalone Internet regulatory with the power to break up tech monopolies.<\/p>\n

Talking about breaking up well-oiled, wealth-concentration machines is being seen as a populist vote winner. And companies that political leaders used to flatter and seek out for PR opportunities find themselves treated as political punchbags; Called to attend awkward grilling by hard-grafting committees<\/a>, or taken to vicious task verbally<\/a> at the highest profile public podia. (Though some non-democratic heads of state are still keen to press tech giant flesh<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In Europe, Facebook\u2019s repeat snubs<\/a>\u00a0of the UK parliament\u2019s requests last year for Zuckerberg to face policymakers\u2019 questions certainly did not go unnoticed.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s empty chair at the DCMS committee has become both a symbol of the company\u2019s failure to accept wider societal responsibility for its products, and an indication of market failure; the CEO so powerful he doesn\u2019t feel answerable to anyone; neither his most vulnerable users nor their elected representatives. Hence UK politicians on both sides of the aisle making political capital by talking about cutting tech giants down to size.<\/p>\n

The political fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal looks far from done.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Quite how a UK regulator could successfully swing a regulatory hammer to break up a global Internet giant such as Facebook which is headquartered in the U.S. is another matter. But policymakers have already crossed the rubicon of public opinion and are relishing talking up having a go.<\/p>\n

That represents a sea-change vs the neoliberal consensus that allowed competition regulators to sit on their hands for more than a decade as technology upstarts quietly hoovered up people\u2019s data and bagged<\/a>\u00a0rivals<\/a>, and basically went about transforming themselves from highly scalable startups into market-distorting giants<\/a> with Internet-scale data-nets to snag users and buy or block competing ideas.<\/p>\n

\n

Zuckerberg owns or clones most of the \u201c8 social apps\u201d he cites as competition<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The political spirit looks willing to go there, and now the mechanism for breaking platforms\u2019 distorting hold on markets may also be shaping up. <\/span><\/p>\n

The traditional antitrust remedy of breaking a company along its business lines still looks unwieldy when faced with the blistering pace of digital technology. <\/span>The problem is delivering such a fix fast enough that the business hasn\u2019t already reconfigured to route around the reset.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Commission antitrust decisions on the tech beat have stepped up impressively in pace on Vestager\u2019s watch. Yet it still feels like watching paper pushers wading through treacle to try and catch a sprinter. (And Europe hasn\u2019t gone so far as\u00a0trying to impose a platform break up.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the German FCO decision against Facebook hints at an alternative way forward for regulating the dominance of digital monopolies: Structural remedies that focus on controlling access to data which can be relatively swiftly configured and applied.<\/p>\n

Vestager, whose term as EC competition chief may be coming to its end this year (even if other Commission roles remain in potential and tantaliz<\/a><\/span>ing contention<\/a>), has\u00a0championed this idea herself<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

In an interview on BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today<\/em> program in December she poured cold water on the stock question about breaking tech giants up \u2014 saying instead the Commission could look at how larger firms got access to data and resources as a means of limiting their power. <\/span>Which is exactly what the German FCO has done in its order to Facebook.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, Europe\u2019s updated data protection framework has gained the most attention for the size of the financial penalties that can be issued for major compliance breaches. But the regulation also gives data watchdogs the power to limit or ban processing. And that power could similarly be used to\u00a0reshape a rights-eroding business model or snuff out such business entirely.<\/p>\n

\n

#GDPR<\/a> allows imposing a permanent ban on data processing. This is the nuclear option. Much more severe than any fine you can imagine, in most cases. https:\/\/t.co\/X772NvU51S<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) January 28, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The merging of privacy and antitrust concerns is really just a reflection of the complexity of the challenge regulators now face trying to rein in digital monopolies. But they\u2019re tooling up to meet that challenge.<\/p>\n

Speaking in an interview with TechCrunch<\/a> last fall, Europe\u2019s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us the bloc\u2019s privacy regulators are moving towards more joint working with antitrust agencies to respond to platform power. \u201cEurope would like to speak with one voice, not only within data protection but by approaching this issue of digital dividend, monopolies in a better way \u2014 not per sectors,\u201d he said. \u201cBut first joint enforcement and better co-operation is key.\u201d<\/p>\n

The German FCO\u2019s decision represents tangible evidence of the kind of regulatory co-operation that could \u2014 finally \u2014 crack down on tech giants.<\/p>\n

Blogging<\/a> in support of the decision this week,\u00a0Buttarelli asserted: \u201cIt is not necessary for competition authorities to enforce other areas of law; rather they need simply to identity where the most powerful undertakings are setting a bad example and damaging the interests of consumers.\u00a0 Data protection authorities are able to assist in this assessment.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also had a prediction of his own for surveillance technologists, warning:\u00a0\u201cThis case is the tip of the iceberg \u2014 all companies in the digital information ecosystem that rely on tracking, profiling and targeting should be on notice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So perhaps, at long last, the regulators have figured out how to move fast and break things.<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/uSXKTLUkicw\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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