Biometric data and surveillance capitalism

Biometric data and surveillance capitalism 

The recent creation of a National Register of Mobile Telephone Users, which requires the registration of biometric data of all users, has opened a necessary debate on its potential impacts. However, key context elements are missing. 

The conversion of our personal and identifying characteristics to digital data is a key component of today's capitalism, aptly named surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Biometric data, especially facial features and irises, not only identify a person, they are also of enormous relevance for interpreting emotions, which is essential for the lucrative industry of selling behavioral futures, that is, the gambling and manipulation of our behaviors to push us to do what the companies / governments that pay for it want. In addition, they are essential for facial recognition from surveillance cameras, even in crowds, whether for control, repression or commercial purposes.

 

 Everything becomes more serious because the volume of data that this type of registry implies in entire populations can only be stored and managed in huge computing clouds, a sector brutally concentrated in few companies. More than half of the global market is held by the United States' Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM, followed by the Chinese Alibaba. Also Oracle and Dell have significant percentages. The first three, together with Apple and Facebook, also control more than half of the global electronic platform market, and together with China's Alibaba and Tencent, more than two thirds. Although the large telephone companies collect the data - and can use it for their business - most, such as Telcel and Telmex, contract services from the former.  

 Worse still, various levels of government, from the federal to states and municipalities, host electronic data for part or all of their activities - including population registers or sectors of it (such as students, patients, beneficiaries of various systems) - in those same clouds, connected to their platforms. They will say that there are regulations on their access to the data they store, manage and / or provide services, but besides being very insufficient, they cannot really control what these giants do. There are examples of abuse with tremendous impacts, such as Cambridge Analytica that resulted in the election of Trump, Macri, Bolsonaro and others.

  

This new form of capitalist organization is based on digitization in all industrial areas, together with the electronic platformization of social relations, commercial and financial transactions, domestic purchases and others. Also the installation of increasingly advanced surveillance mechanisms inside and outside homes, to advance in the connection of all devices, to know –and suggest, persuade, push– our behaviors.

 All of this has caused multiple social, economic, political, environmental, labor, and health impacts; most negative. With the pandemic, the electronic invasion of our life and work expanded enormously and massively incorporated essential aspects such as education, health care and meetings of all kinds.

 Although surveillance for the purposes of control and repression by governments and authorities is an extraordinarily magnified and facilitated effect in this new capitalist era, the main interest of companies is the surveillance of our daily lives in order to influence and manipulate our consumer choices , political, social and educational. 

The extraction and storage of people's data (in addition to cities, ecosystems, territories) that are crossed with other records, managed and interpreted with artificial intelligence algorithms are one of the main sources of profit for the technological giants. It is so large that nine of the 10 largest companies with the highest market value are technological, several with a market value greater than the entire GDP of Mexico.

  

That profit was based on the first generation of extraction and exploitation of our data. 

 The next step was not only to sell data grouped by segments of interest for company announcements, but to sell the prediction and modification of the behaviors of those groups. For this, the quantity and quality of data that can be added and crossed with each other - such as geographic location, education, income level, consumption preferences, health status, etc., are fundamental. For this reason, the biometrics and facial recognition industries have grown dramatically, because they allow better monitoring, interpreting and manipulating emotions, a product of high value for companies.

 Despite the high penetration of this reality, the social discussion of the impacts of surveillance capitalism is very limited, but there is an important debate from organizations and grassroots activists (https://tinyurl.com/vwmf4wzb). 

The national and international regulations necessary to control and / or prohibit these activities, challenge monopolies, etc., are ridiculously insufficient or do not exist. They also refer to individual options and rights, when it comes to global and population exploitation to which we need to respond with debates and collective rights. In this difficult context, making the delivery of our biometric data mandatory - the dream of the tech giants - is a bad idea. 

 * Researcher at the ETC Group