Trouble with the Internet

Maciej Cegłowski gave this talk on the dangers of the Internet: it was great when it started but the impossible-to-anticipate effects are becoming the problem.

A big issue is that the Internet never forgets. He compares it to the concept of the “permanent record” in American schools, which were made to sound as follows:

“The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.”

We feared the accidental deletes that could end up “undoing months of work with a single keystroke”. And so when storage costs dropped to the ground, “we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever (because) you never know what will come in useful”. But on the Internet, the problem has become that “everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom”. The tech companies’ response to that:

“Wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal.”

Next came Big Data, the belief in software circles that:

“Collect enough information, think of a clever enough algorithm, and you can find anything.”

And if there’s Big Data, can Big Brother be far behind?

“If these vast databases are valuable enough, it doesn't matter who they belong to. The government will always find a way to query them…The word 'terrorism' is an open sesame that opens any doors.”

Notice how all the Internet’s giants are American companies, asks Cegłowski. Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook…That’s dangerous for non-Americans:

“As ‘non-US-persons’, you fall completely outside the protection of our privacy laws. Too bad your data is on our servers!”

Next comes the problem of what may happen to all that data later:

“What happens if Facebook goes out of business, like so many of the social networks that came before it?...What happens to all that data?”

That’s why Cegłowski equates all that collected data to, er, radioactive waste!

“These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It's easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you've buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected.”

So what’s the solution then? The future isn’t bright, says Cegłowski:

“In the United States, they warn us the world will end if someone tries to regulate the Internet.”