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< | American Respect for Privacy May Help in the Fight Against Mass Surveillance. | >
> | Surveillance Capitalism in an Anti-Democratic Space | | | | |
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< | -- By ElaineHuang - 09 Oct 2020 | >
> | -- By ElaineHuang - 30 Dec 2020 | | | | |
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< | Chinese Surveillance is Scary, But Not for the Chinese. | >
> | Introduction | | | | |
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< | We have seen how data collection can impact behavior, and nowhere is that more evident than in the People’s Republic of China. While the Social Credit System has not yet been rolled out nationwide, certain localities have begun their own versions in which they reward those with good behavior and punish those with bad, and it is quite easy for authorities to do so in a country with hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras. | >
> | In the Western sphere, companies like Facebook collect and sell users’ data to other companies that then use that data to change our thoughts and actions, often to get us to buy more things and increase these companies’ profits. People are used mainly as a means to a commercial end. | | | | |
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< | Surveillance in China has been even more evident during the pandemic. After being tested for COVID-19, Chinese people will get color codes on their phones that signify their health status and track the places they visit. Residential areas and university campuses also guard against the virus by using facial recognition software to prevent outsiders from entering. Admittedly, this surveillance does seem to have played a positive role in curtailing the spread of the virus in China, where cases have dropped significantly. | >
> | In China, however, while surveillance capitalism exists, it is used differently. Where democracy is nonexistent and privacy from the government is basically a lost cause, surveillance capitalism serves first and foremost the government. Certain Chinese cities have started to use data from surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to implement behavior-based credit programs that reward those with good behavior and punish those with bad, which is determined by the government. While companies like Tencent and Alibaba can certainly benefit from consumer data collection by selling it to third parties, ultimately, it is the government who controls. For example, when Jack Ma, founder of Ant Group, criticized China’s financial regulation policies, the Chinese Communist Party quickly responded by blocking Ant Group’s IPO, and from this, it seems that a business can do what they want in China, but only if they show complete respect for the government’s authority. | | | | |
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< | Even before the pandemic, however, many Chinese people have been enjoying the conveniences of these technologies in their daily lives. Shoppers no longer had to remember to bring their wallets or cash; they simply needed to bring their phones to stores to make a purchase via QR code. Others didn’t even need to bring their phones–they could pay via facial recognition. | >
> | In the following paragraphs, I attempt to provide a brief explanation as to why surveillance capitalism and privacy works the way it does in China. | | | | |
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< | Indeed, it is the benefits of surveillance that most Chinese focus on. When you talk to Chinese citizens about the Social Credit System, or surveillance in general, many respond that they feel much safer knowing that someone is watching out for crime, that public trust has increased, and that life has become more convenient. Many do not care that large companies have handed all of their data to the government as long as the public and private good gained outweighs the cognizable loss of control of their private data. | | | | |
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> | Culture and Privacy in China | | | | |
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< | So Why Are They Not Scared? | >
> | While there is a growing privacy concern among some Chinese citizens, this concern is focused more on how people's individual data is sold to third parties, rather than on privacy from the government. The Chinese legislative system has also focused on the former, rather than the latter, in its relatively nascent development of privacy laws. These laws, at least on paper, protect consumers’ data from exploitation by corporations and private individuals (e.g. the MIIT Internet Information Services Regulations, which aims to regulate the collection of personal information by telecommunications companies, and the SC-NPC Decision on Internet Information Protection). There is no equivalent protection from governmental intrusions of privacy. | | | | |
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< | Our cultural notions of privacy play a role in how we perceive this collection of our data. For us in the western world, where individualism and privacy are highly valued, surveillance capitalism has begun to sound alarms. The backlash from the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as documentaries produced for the masses such as The Great Hack and The Social Dilemma, has brought these concerns into the minds of Americans. While the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly contain a right to privacy, certain aspects of privacy are indeed constitutionally protected, and so it is not too surprising that privacy is inherent to the American mind. | | | | |
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< | In contrast, Chinese people grow up with a lower expectation of privacy. Even as a Chinese-American–the American part allowing me more privacy than my cousins–I still grew up expecting my mom to open my mail before I got to it and to have her listening to my telephone calls on the other line. Many Chinese people do not miss privacy because they know little about it in the first place and therefore do not hold it to the same pedestal as, for example, Americans. Some Chinese, who are at least aware of the notion of privacy, simply disregard any concerns. As one woman interviewed by the New York Times stated, “Alipay already has all our data. So what are we afraid of? Seriously.” | >
> | Community Values | | | | |
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> | This could be a result of the long-lasting impact of Confucianism in Chinese culture, where the individual’s rights come second to that of the larger community to create order. The CCP takes this to mean that anything that might impede achieving this lofty goal of order and harmony must be eliminated. In the development of Chinese privacy law, these Confucian values ended up forming a basis for what it will or will not protect against. So, even with this growing concern of having their personal data sold on a black market, many people focus on the benefits that these surveillance technologies provide. For example, shoppers no longer have to bring their wallets or cash; they can pay via facial recognition or QR code. During the pandemic, people have received color codes on their phones to signify their health status and track the places they visit. Residential areas and university campuses also have guarded against the virus by using facial recognition software to prevent outsiders from entering. Many believe that this sort of surveillance technology, and the Social Credit System, ultimately makes society better, safer, and more orderly. Thus, this ideal of community greater than oneself may be one of the contributing factors as to why the growing concern for privacy in China focuses less on privacy from the government, as it’s a small price to pay for the good of society. | | | | |
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< | The Good News: This is an Important Difference. | | | | |
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< | The current situation in America–providing personal data to companies like Facebook and Google–is more a result of a lack of awareness or understanding of the extent to which our data is being sold and our privacy is being invaded, rather than simply apathy. Unlike Chinese people, Americans have understood and valued privacy starting from a young age, and because we feel like we have more to lose, this may give us an advantage in the fight against this invasion of surveillance technologies. | >
> | Protection From Shame | | | | |
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> | There are also the Confucian notions of shame and bringing disgrace to one’s family. Regarding the “human flesh search engine” in China, where netizens dox certain individuals who do things that the community online deems wrong or immoral, privacy would act as a protection against such harassment. In one particular instance where a cheating man was harassed online and offline over the suicide of his wife, the People’s Court in Beijing fined the hosting website and a friend of the wife very negligible amounts. According to the New York Times, the court “chastised Wang, who admitted his infidelity, and said it had reduced the amount of the fines because of his moral lapses.”
The shame and extreme harassment have caused some to demand stricter privacy laws in China, as people’s livelihoods and lives have been ruined after becoming a target of human flesh searching, and in 2017, the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate announced that perpetrators could get up to seven years behind bars. So we see an instance of growing protection in the law against privacy intrusions by private actors/corporations, although whether or not these laws are strictly enforced is a different issue. | | | | |
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< | The Bad News: We Still Have a Long Way to go. | >
> | Conclusion
Our cultural notions of privacy play a role in how we perceive this collection of our data. In the western democratic world, individualism and privacy are highly valued, and we have seen how surveillance capitalism has affected our politics during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. There is thus a demand for greater privacy rights protection from both corporations/private actors and the government here. In contrast, the growing demand for privacy in China distinguishes between privacy from corporations and private actors and privacy from the government. In China, where the government is absolute, the CCP uses surveillance capitalism for the purposes of statecraft but is willing to allow companies to benefit up to a point, as long as they completely defer to the CCP. And the people, partly due to their cultural perspective on privacy and partly due to their understanding that asking for privacy from the government would be a wasted effort, demand less of this protection and/or view governmental surveillance as beneficial to their country. Thus surveillance capitalism may continue to serve the CCP for years to come, but as the people in China become more aware of companies and other individuals exploiting their personal information, perhaps Chinese privacy law will develop to some extent to protect against this latter form of intrusion. | | | | |
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< | Americans, despite appreciating privacy, post thousands of social media posts or location tags each year. Many of us don’t understand where our data is going and how it is then used to change our behavior. While we can demand better protections for our personal data via legislation, it may be faster for us to gain an understanding of how these companies collect our data, what they plan to use it for, and any limitations they place on the use of our data. This way we can give or refuse to give our informed consent. In contrast, right now, we are so eager to gain the convenience of some new service or site that we blindly hand over the rights to our personal information. However, as long as we can educate the American public to be aware of the risks, and if Americans truly care about their privacy, we will not allow our society to become the Big Brother dystopia that many see in a society under China’s Social Credit System.
This is a very interesting draft. I don't know how I feel about essentialisms such as "Chinese are ..." or "Americans are ..." because we all know so many exceptions. But I do believe in culture, in the sense that I think thousands of years of Confucian thinking and acting present a basis for human self-understanding that is deeply different from the same period in the democracies, roughly from Socrates to Lincoln. I think the democratic societies are changing deeply in their interaction with the Parasite with the Mind of God
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But they are changing not at all in the same way as the one leading to the perfection of despotism by a Chinese Communist Party believing itself to be in possesion of the Mandate of Heaven and ruling all the inferior peoples and the patriotic Han with firmness that creates harmony (also sometimes a little massacre or two, but that's just pragmatism, in the end). Each has developed a relationship to the parasite that can be characterized as surveillance capitalism, though the current state of play between the CCP and Jack Ma over Ant Financial shows why "Alipay has all our data anyway" is not quite as simple as the woman in the street might think. Surveillance capitalism, like capitalism tout court, exists with and without "Chinese characteristics," comfortably.
So I do believe as you say here that the difference between "American" (actually, humanist and democratic) and "Chinese" (actually, Confucian and radically anti-democratic) outlooks on questions of privacy. Secrecy and anonymity are absolutely anathema to both the Confucian and post-Confucian CCP worldviews. Autonomy is unimportant because violations of secrecy and anonymity are unremitting. Secrecy and anonymity are more complexly viewed in the democratic tradition, so the discussion of privacy turns out to be conducted in a confusing stew of consequentialist "but what about"isn and libertarian rhetoric, while the parasite's collaborators grow overwhelmingly rich and spend some of their wealth emitting rainbow-colored ink into the water in self-protective camouflage.
But this draft is not really about politics, or law, or technology. Any or all of those directions would certainly make it possible to improve what is strong here and to strengthen the parts that could use it.
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