Big Brother, Watching Your Social Distancing

So far this week, it looks like Coronavirus is taking aim at three things:

1. The British royal family, with Prince Charles announcing a positive diagnosis
2. Easter, with egg prices in the United States soaring and hoarders gobbling up the surplus egg supply that was being built up for Donald Trump’s Easter.
3. Local news.
4. Your privacy.

And maybe that last one is a bit overblown.

But here’s this company, Unacast, using GPS data from cell phones to grade us, county by county, on whether we’re doing the social distancing we should.

I say company, but I’m not sure who these dudebros from Norway are.

Here’s their privacy statement:

The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household. However to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day - and then extrapolate the results to the population level. As a company that originated in Norway we put privacy front and center and believe it to be an individual right, and since we operate on both sides of the Atlantic, we have been operating within the GDPR guidelines since May 2018 and this year also adopted the CCPA guidelines for the whole of the US (not only California).

But [enter the wormy med student from “Young Frankenstein”] isn’t it true they could they identify individuals via cellphone? Probably, given the technology available. We’re seeing such tracking in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and probably other places too.

Temporary measures, you say.

Maybe.

But we are in the era of paranoid/populist governments, where such temporary measures could become the norm, you know.

I know this sounds paranoid. And I would have to say if someone official wanted to use my phone GPS to track my whereabouts and movements, my inherent Dutch stubbornness would be to tell them to pound sand. And I’d leave my phone home.

Also, part of me looks at their county-by-county data and things, well, this is kinda like a heat map for distance as well as population. Out west, where I live, things are further apart than in other areas of the country. And looking at Alaska, where they’re being praised for little movements in their boroughs or census areas, I’ll wager population is sparse for the most part (or concentrated, such as in Anchorage) so the data from this month might not look all that different from the data from this time last year.

There are just a lot of questions here, even setting privacy aside.

I do not confess to be a genius. My analysis here is totally by the seat of my pants. But I’d like to ask these dudebros some questions.

"A Heavy Tax Shall Be Levied . . . "

There be times I evaluate what I use social media for. Here’s what I come up with:

1. Putting random stuff out there to amuse myself.
2. Putting random stuff out there to amuse specific people.
3. Staying in touch with family and friends.
4. Just putting random stuff out there.
5. Sometimes reading and reacting to the news, mostly local.

I primarily use Facebook, because that’s where the people are. I have a personal blog. And a Twitter account I remember I have when Goodreads reminds me of the option to post stuff to my Twitter.

Yes, I have a Goodreads account. And a YouTube account. But I don’t look at them as social media. Goodreads, I post book reviews. I might once in a blue moon read one from someone else. But not often. And YouTube I use almost exclusively as a consumer of old bits from Top Gear, random movies, Dry Bar Comedy, and old music. I rarely post anything there, comments or content.

What would my world look like if I had to pay for it all?

Well. I could text to stay in touch with family, to be sure. And there are other sources of local news. I used to have my own website back in the early days of the Internet, cobbled together with random stuff, book reviews, original writing and such, much like the blog I have today.

Would I pay for any of the social media I use?

I suppose. If the price point were low enough.

Do I think everyone having to pay to use social media would better the social media environment? Hardly. There are lots of people out there with deeper pockets than mine who’d still post the trash we complain about, from naughty pictures to fake news. Put the price high enough and I guess I don’t get to see any of that (not that I seek it out).

But I read an argument today in favor of paying for social media use, and I remain unconvinced paying for it would do anything to make the Internet a better place.

First of all – would social media companies use my money as a substitution for money they’re getting from folks who want to monetize social media customers and what they post and what they buy and what they fart around doing online? Not hardly. My local grocery store could hope to increase its profits by offering a wider variety of organic, non-GMO products, but they’re not going to give up the money they can get from people who buy “cheez” in cans and subsist on pizza rolls. And if they do, there are plenty of other places to buy junk food. Why should social media companies be any different?

Second, customers paying for stuff doesn’t suddenly make companies noble and better behaved. There are plenty of companies out there which indulge in rotten behavior – banks come to mind, considering the 2008 crash; automobile companies like Volkswagen lie about emissions; the list is endless – and customers give these companies gobs of money. And there appears to be plenty of regulation there too. Money spent on monitoring and monetizing social media users can just as easily be spent on bribing politicians.

Third, would the bad actors simply pay and continue their nefarious mischief? “If we paid for our social media presence,” the author writes, “outrage would simultaneously cease being as cheap to us and as valuable to others. How many trolls, shit-posters, and troglodytes could we shake simply by forcing them to jump a paywall?”

Well, a few impoverished ones like me would probably quit. But the professionals? And those willing to pay a little for a larff? They’d still be there, in numbers. How high a premium would have to be set to kill the shitposters? Probably high enough to kill any value in social media for those who want to use it to post random funnies, communicate with family, and read the local news.

Best yet, the author of this piece calls for a “progressive tax” on social media ad revenue. To what end? To get social media companies to accept less advertising, which any dumb user can usually block with browser-based ad blocking services? Levying taxes doesn’t suddenly convince a company to surrender a revenue stream; this flies in the face of the “marginalize legaluana” movements that say, “Hey, legalize it, tax it, and we’ll suddenly have magical unicorns spewing money at every school.” And who gets the tax money, and for what purpose? The government? Boy, we sure know the government doesn’t dabble in mass surveillance nor waste its money on stupid things. That tax would probably be spent on more unicorns.

Spending less time on social media, that would be the thing. Or fooling around on it with family and friends, not paying much attention to the argle-bargle and garbage that’s out there (note my scant use of Twitter; that’s my crap-avoidance strategy). But that’s not as easily done as putting up paywalls and levying taxes, so why write about that?

Now I don’t give these tech behemoths a pass. They do a lot of naughty stuff. But. So do people who charge their customers for the privilege. Taking the democratizing effect of social media away is still a high price to pay.

I wonder how the author would have felt if Quillette wanted him to pay to post his article?