IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 18

Only a very few [companies]
decided to shut down operations
rather than to jeopardize their
users' privacy.
but endanger their continued operation and profits, or to give in to governmental pressure and be able to
continue their businesses as usual,
virtually none of the corporations
chose to protect their clients. Only
a very few decided to shut down
operations rather than to jeopardize their users' privacy. In fact,
the only one I am aware of is Lavabit, a small-scale secure email
provider used by Edward Snowden
at the time [4]. All of the major
technology players - Facebook,
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and so
on - verifiably chose profit over
protection of privacy [5], [6]. Moreover, the reality is that these corporations were, (and continue to be)
the prime enablers that made the
current state of global surveillance
possible in the first place [7]. This is
because of their use of profit ensuring, but inherently insecure proprietary software (which always leaves
the corporation in control) [8], as
well as what Shoshana Zuboff calls
"Surveillance Capitalism" business
practices [9], which are based on the
corporations' commodification of
people's lives and data. This renders
as potentially questionable Apple's
recent "strong stance against the FBI,"
when it refused to help "break their
[i.e., Apple's] encryption." One could
suspect, for example, that had the FBI
not dragged the matter into the public
sphere, Apple may have complied in
much the same way it already did and
continues to do [10],[11]. One could
speculate further that Apple, being

design, produce, and govern the
technologies our privacy depends
on, there is very little prospect for
the protection of anyone's privacy.

a rather clever company,
pulled a marketing judo
move, and turned an unfortunate situation into a very
PR-effective opportunity to
display their deep concern
for the privacy of consumers, coincidentally just before the launch of their
newest iPhone [12], [13].

Amending the Status Quo
How then, are we to deal with all
of this? How can we amend the
status quo? Is there really no way
to coerce for-profit corporations
to take account of the interests of
private citizens? Could they not,
through sufficient consumer pressure, be forced to make it a rational
goal within their utility functions
to "care" or at least protect certain
aspects of users' privacy? Maybe,
and some would say this pressure
is exactly the reasons for Apple's
earlier mentioned "strong stance"
against the FBI.
Unfortunately, such a "solution"
would a) not change the fact that a
corporation would simply be forced
to accept privacy as an unfortunate
but necessary expense to continue business, not as a true goal in
itself, and b) even if the argument
appears valid in principle, in practice it would probably turn out differently and mostly in the form of
the aforementioned window dressing. The recent emissions scandal
that erupted around VW, but has
since spread to many other car
manufacturers (proving the systemic, not individual nature of this
problem) [15], [16], can be considered evidence for this claim. There
too, one could have put forward
the consumer pre ssure argument,
which could force VW to produce
more environmentally friendly cars.
In other words, that option is out
of the window. What about moving
to free and open source software
(FOSS) alternatives? Again, in principle, this would be possible. But
anyone who has, like me, tried to
get friends and family to switch from
Facebook, Skype, Whatsapp, and
so on to Diaspora, TOX, and Signal

Potential Conflict
What has been discussed so far
might already suffice to prove, if
not a full-out incompatibility, then
at least a certain potential conflict
between for-profit corporations and
notions of privacy in a strong sense.
Yet, there is another dimension to
the corporations' inherent characteristics worth illuminating: their
glaring autocracy and authoritarianism. While in the physical world,
constitutional law and principles of
democracy serve to protect citizens'
rights (such as the protection against
unwarranted search and seizure), in
the digital space such mechanisms
currently are largely absent. There,
in places like "Facebookistan," as
Rebeka Mackinac renamed Facebook, "sovereignty and power are
ill-defined and highly contested. The
reality is that the corporations and
governments that build, operate and
govern cyberspace are not being
held sufficiently accountable for
their exercise of power over the [digital] lives and identities of people
who use digital networks. They are
sovereign entities operating without
the consent of the networked" [13,
p.14]. Furthermore, these sovereign
entities are not Plato's quasi-dictatorial but benevolent philosopherkings. They are proper, authoritarian
dictators with selfish motives and
very little to no democratic legitimacy or oversight at all [14]. Which,
as I see it, means that within the
status quo, where pathological,
authoritarian for-profit corporations
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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september 2016

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