Technology is an incredibly convenient scapegoat for society’s problems. Most of us couldn’t actually explain what an API is, how algorithms work or what labor goes into creating AI. We know that our pocket computers do the things we want them to do and beyond that, there’s no need to fully understand the mechanics behind it.
Unfortunately for us, the politicians regulating these massive, billion-dollar corporations don’t seem to understand technology much better than the average American. This creates an environment where it’s incredibly easy to lie about how technology works in order to serve the interests of tech monopolies. That dynamic was illustrated last week when the U.S. Congress passed a rushed bill to ban TikTok on the grounds that it’s a national security threat because it could theoretically be giving user data to the Chinese government.
This Orwellian bill, which would force a privately-owned company to sell to non-Chinese owners in order to remain operating in the U.S., would do nothing to change or regulate tech companies from tracking, storing or selling our personal data. Anyone, including so-called “hostile foreign governments,” can buy just about any data they want on Americans. It’s disappointing that both Maine congress members Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden voted with the majority of their colleagues to pass the bill. But while our federal government does the bidding of major tech companies, there’s a genuine glimmer of hope for meaningful regulation in Maine.
Our state has quietly become a national leader in tech and privacy regulation. In 2021, Maine passed a partial ban on facial recognition technology. And in 2019, we passed a privacy bill that bans internet service providers from selling consumer data without explicit consent. Right now, the Legislature is considering a proposal that could meaningfully regulate the ways tech companies harvest personal information from Mainers. The bill, introduced by Democratic Rep. Maggie O’Neil of Saco, would become one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation if passed. It provides consumers with an individual option to sue if companies violate the law, and limits companies’ data collection practices to only those most relevant to the product in question.
Predictably, the big tech companies and business lobbies are working overtime to weaken the protections in this bill, as they have done in just about every other state that introduced privacy legislation in the past few years.
Judiciary Committee inches closer to a comprehensive data privacy law
The tech industry tends to frame technology like AI and facial surveillance as an inevitability. Tech innovates and evolves, bringing new advances that are purported to help us become more efficient and capable. In reality, most of us who have been alive and on the internet for the past decade have noticed that Google searches are nearly useless in finding certain information, Amazon is filled with junk products, and “innovations” that were supposed to make our lives easier are just plain dumb. No one actually wants or needs a smart trashcan that sends your phone an alert when it’s smelly.
When data harvesting is as completely unregulated as it is today, we start to see how often “innovation” is just surveillance in disguise. Take a recent story about how automaker GM has been sending customer driving habits to LexisNexis, which sells driving profiles to insurance companies. According to the New York Times, a 65-year-old man who had never been in an accident sought answers when his insurance rates jumped 21%. He learned that his GM car had been sending incredibly detailed data back to LexisNexis, including the times he sped, accelerated rapidly or braked suddenly. LexisNexis then sold this data to insurance companies, which used it to justify the rate increase.
What we previously deemed personal and private information is now a vast, unregulated profit opportunity for tech giants. Data about your eyeballs, face, location habits and even your voice won’t be off limits to these companies unless we set strong data privacy protections with meaningful enforcement mechanisms.
O’Neil’s bill offers that kind of protection — or at least a good start in reining in some of these unchecked practices. But in classic corporate fashion, Republican Sen. Lisa Keim of Oxford introduced a competing bill that is more friendly to Big Tech: it would not provide individual enforcement mechanisms and is more broad in how it defines sensitive information. Now, instead of being poised to lead the nation in protecting the privacy of our residents, it’s possible that the tech and business lobbyists succeed in passing a final bill that is less stringent about what data can be collected and fails to provide sufficient enforcement mechanisms.
Technology is shaped and built by the society and cultures that create it. We used to have an open internet, somewhere you could find virtually all of human knowledge at your fingertips. But thanks to relentless growth models and unchecked capitalism, the internet we used to know has died. More accurately: it was killed. Gone are personal websites and vast internet rabbit holes or free-form projects and forums where every oddity and special interest thrived. Unless we take action now, the same companies that killed the internet will tell us it’s impossible to recreate the open internet. It’s entirely possible, but we’ll only get it back by regulating the unlimited data harvesting and tech consolidation that destroyed it.
