Quote of the Day (Jennifer Egan, on the Abuse of Online Personal Data)

“We decide what's worth paying for, but it's more to understand that you should know what you're paying. We are succumbing to manipulation created by the smartest people in the world to figure out how to get us to do exactly what we're doing. As long as everyone keeps that in mind, great, but sometimes I think if people kept it more firmly in mind, they might resist a little.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Jennifer Egan, on how online personal data is a tech company commodity, quoted by Alice Fishburn, “Lunch With the FT Jennifer Egan: ‘It’s Hard to Write Satire in America,’” The Financial Times, Aug. 27-28, 2022

I watched with disgust this week’s coverage of U.S. Senators grilling American tech execs about online child safety.

The parents holding up pictures of their children whose deaths were attributed to social media were right to feel sorrow and anger. But the outrage of our nation’s lawmakers should have been directed less at the representatives of TikTok, X and Meta and more at themselves. 

Six years ago, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg faced similarly tough congressional questions on how Facebook data profiles of up to 87 million people came into the hands of the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Yet now, he, joined by other tech execs, was back on the hot seat.

His reappearance could mean that the tech industry is devising ever more creative ways to secure our personal data for no good reason. It could also mean that in the interim, Congress has been less interested in its oversight function than in its periodic, ridiculous display of moral indignation. The two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive.

It’s a bit rich for Senator Lindsay Graham, for instance, to tell Zuckerberg that he has “blood on your hands.”

When tech industry executives took steps to try to verify social media content and police it for threats, many members of the House and Senate decried it as abridging First Amendment rights.

So we now have a former President and current candidate spouting 2020 election falsehoods on social media that led to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021—and whose lies and threats about his ongoing trials are still endangering law enforcement officials, prosecutors and judges to this day.

Likewise, Senator Tom Cotton was careless—no, shameless—in repeatedly asking TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew if he was affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. It was a McCarthyite tactic: asking a question that plants doubt, all without having the slightest reason or evidence to justify the inquiry.

As Jennifer Egan noted in the quote above, even adults are succumbing to manipulation created by the smartest people in the world. How do young people stand a chance in the same environment?

(The image of Jennifer Egan that accompanies this post was taken in August 2007 by David Shankbone.)