Big Tech has always – like any other industry – promoted institutional contacts at various levels to represent its demands to legislators and intervene on measures that endanger its interests. ‘Institutional relations’ consultants – lobbyists, in other words – spend their time gathering information on what is happening in the precints of power and, on the other hand, make available documents, technical analyses and statistical data that decision-makers often do not have the means or the opportunity to obtain, or support public events organised by institutional actors as a form of ‘civil engagement’ and ‘social responsibility’. For some time now, however, the activity of influencing political choices has also begun to extend to interaction with civil society – activists and associations for the defence of ‘digital rights’ – and then, finally, directly to the people, or rather, to people’s perception of the concept of rights by Andrea Monti – Initally published in Italian by Strategikon – Italian Tech La Repubblica This last step is of fundamental importance because Big Tech understood, before and better than the legislator, that what counts is not what is written in the Official Gazette but what people perceive to be their right or (much less often) their duty.
A paradigmatic example is the right to privacy, hastily (and erroneously) equated with the protection of personal data, the meaning of which is not understood by people on the basis of their knowledge of the rules, but is influenced by Big Tech’s communication strategies.
Many will remember Apple’s huge international campaign billboards depicting an iPhone with the claim ‘Privacy. That’s iPhone’, and someone, walking along Via Luisa di Savoia, near Piazza del Popolo, will have noticed the one with the slogan “Safari, a browser that protects your privacy”, while those who stopped to look at the Neptune Fountain in Piazza Navona will have come across, some time ago, a similar billboard advertising a Samsung Galaxy in the same terms.
The subtext is clear: we decide what privacy is, just as we decide whether, how and how much to protect it.
Thus, the content of a right that should be established through a public debate mediated in parliament is unilaterally decided, de facto because nobody cares about the right, by non-EU multinational companies according to their own commercial needs.
This appropriation of the value content of a right is not an isolated fact, but a consolidated trend, as demonstrated by the creation of the Apple Relay service, the choice to oppose the protection of the privacy of its customers to the FBI’s requests for cooperation in the S. Bernardino massacre investigation, and then, more recently, a paragraph appearing in the message inviting them to upgrade to the latest version of OS X, in which we read verbatim
Privacy
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– Sensitive Content Warnings can be enabled to help prevent users from unexpectedly viewing sensitive images in Messages
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– Expanded Communication Safety protections for children now detect videos containing nudity in addition to photos shared through Messages and the system Photos picker
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– Improved sharing permissions let you choose which photos to share and add calendar events without providing access to your entire photo library or calendar
It is quite clear to legal practitioners that some of these features have nothing to do with privacy protection, whatever we want to call it.
If, in fact, the possibility of limiting the sharing of information and content may fall within the sphere of control over one’s own data (and why is it only now that they are being protected? one might ask), the automatic blocking of certain messages and content has very little to do with the protection of one’s own cases, and much more with client-side scanning, i.e. the preventive analysis of a device’s contents according to parameters decided by those who control it (Apple) and not by those who use it (those who bought the expensive smartphone). So, if anything, in such a case the privacy problem should concern Apple’s intrusiveness in the user’s life, and it matters little that Cupertino might reply that they have taken care not to violate the individual’s privacy, because this would be a self-determined choice that could be changed at any time.
As a result, the user is slowly, continuously and progressively led to think that delegating to Big Tech the control over what one can and cannot say is a ‘matter of privacy’ instead of freedom of expression. It may be an overused quote, but how can one not think of the semantic reversal of concepts practised by Big Brother in 1984? In other words, evoking the very effective metaphor created by Giancarlo Livraghi, a giant of international advertising and one of the noble fathers of the Italian internet, ‘the risk is that with the excuse of putting a bib on us, they end up putting a gag on us’.
Be that as it may, pragmatically speaking, Big Tech’s interest in affecting users before legislators makes a lot of sense because, in the end, the former are also voters and, in a politics dominated by polls and social shitstorms, voters influence MPs’ choices with their abdominal gags rather than by expressing thoughtful opinions. On the other hand, MPs’ are users and as users they are exposed to the messages and communication strategies adopted by those who have sold them computers, smart devices and online services of various kinds, and on the basis of these they form convictions that then condition, more or less unconsciously, the choices they make as institutional representatives.
So, wishing the Bard a farewell, whoever manages to change the name of a rose, acquires the power to decide its smell, which is not necessarily as pleasant as the original. The important thing is that there is general agreement that it is smell and not something else, even if it is not true. Because the truth, as the PCI official says in the final scene of Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi’s film adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia‘s Equal Danger), is not always revolutionary.