This is part 3 of my series, The Black Purposes of Web3, where I post my undergraduate thesis in sections. Read the series intro.

This post corresponds to the third chapter ("Web 2.0 vs. Data and Privacy"), and contains more academic analysis and citations. It's adapted closely from my original writing.

In the last post, we saw how the web evolved from read-only (Web 1.0) to read-write (Web 2.0), bringing new capabilities for user interaction and content creation. But I ended with a warning: this shift came with consequences. The "architecture of participation" became an "architecture of exploitation." Let's explore what that actually means.

The Data Economy

With the interactive nature of Web 2.0 and its platforms, coupled with rapidly advancing technology, tech companies and other organizations have been able to quickly amass more data than what has ever been possible, and the amount of data continues to grow. "Data" is a collection of facts and information that can have different meanings depending on the context, interpretation, and usage. More specifically, personal data is information about an individual that could be used to identify them specifically, and Web 2.0 technologies and behaviors help facilitate the collection of this type of data.

Personal data can be volunteered explicitly by the user when prompted by an application, observed through a user's activity on the web, or inferred based on the analysis of other personal data.[1] The data is then aggregated and stored by Web 2.0 site owners, web retailers, or Internet search engines, and can contain information with varying levels of sensitivity – from personal interests to location to credit card and credit score information.[1] Web users are not able to have any control over these archives of personal data due to the Terms of Service agreements that many sites have, allowing the site owners to protect the data as their intellectual property.[2]

Companies that own these sites can profit from these large collections of data by analyzing them for trends to improve their business, targeting ads more accurately, or selling them to other entities like advertisers. This data economy in which companies can profit from personal user data "prompts site designers to build websites that are capable of inscribing user activity into increasingly precise databases."[2] The most dominant and influential Web 2.0 tech companies like Google and Meta (Facebook), also known as "Big Tech" (which includes Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft as well), can trace some of their success to optimizing their applications for user data aggregation.

Another component of this data economy is data brokers, or entities that make a profit by buying and selling personal data after aggregating and analyzing user information related to both online and offline activities.[3] Rather than relying on data that was volunteered, observed, or inferred from their own sites like Web 2.0 companies do, data brokers "collect information by buying it from other companies (such as credit card companies), crawling the Internet for public sources of information (such as social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook etc) and many other legal means."[4] Companies base their business models on aggregating and analyzing user data such that they can profit from this information in ways that users themselves cannot, resulting in a skewed power distribution between those producing data and those collecting it.

Privacy and Surveillance

The practice of constantly collecting personal user data for economic gain has raised concerns about privacy for anyone participating in the mainstream web. Privacy is generally thought of as the ability to be left alone from observation by others and to keep one's personal information confidential. In Web 2.0, data tends to be payment for "free" products, and users often do not know how much of their privacy they trade away for these seemingly free products.[5]

Even if people do not explicitly reveal certain information about themselves online, or if companies with data archives claim that their records are anonymized, some research has shown that private or sensitive traits about individuals can be predicted with high accuracy, and potentially connected back to an individual.[1][6] These attributes include "sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender."[6]

This has more troubling implications when these attributes are used to create "data profiles" of Web 2.0 users to trace behaviors for business purposes, often for advertising. A step beyond simply collecting the data, surveillance is the "focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, protection or direction" of those whose information was collected.[7] In an analysis of social networking site Google Buzz as an example of surveillance in Web 2.0, Christian Fuchs explains how Google has become a prevalent example of a company that employs these practices:

"Google's economic strategy is to gather data about users that utilize different Google applications in different everyday situations. The more everyday situations can be supported by Google applications, the more time users will spend online with Google, so that more user data will be available to Google, which allows the company to better analyze usage and consumer behaviour [sic]. As a result, more and more precise user data and aggregated data can be sold to advertising clients who, armed with information about potential consumption choices, provide users with personalized advertising that targets them in all of these everyday situations. Felix Stalder and Christine Mayer (2009) have analyzed the data different Google applications collect and conclude that Google conducts surveillance of users as knowledge persons, social persons, and physical persons. The introduction of ever more applications does primarily serve economic ends that are realized by large-scale user surveillance."[8]

The increase in the number of these information-gathering Web 2.0 applications, combined with the rise in popularity of other devices and technologies that can collect personal data, has facilitated the widespread surveillance of individuals on the web as a way to commodify their sensitive information. Although in many cases this information is volunteered by individuals on certain platforms, it is also often observed based on their behaviors across multiple sites and applications. This tracking and monitoring is not evident to those using these applications, and even if it is, the ability to benefit from their functionality almost always requires the user to accept the terms of surveillance.

The Possibility of Data Ownership

With the issues of surveillance online in the world of Web 2.0 comes the question about the possibility of privacy through data ownership, where a user maintains ownership of their own data rather than companies. In practice, this idea is more difficult to implement than it seems, in part because it is unclear what "owning data" could actually look like. Data derives its meaning and value from the context in which it is analyzed and used, so data on its own is not inherently valuable, demonstrating the paradox of data ownership.[1] Many efforts instead seem geared towards control over one's data and how it is used, rather than simply owning it.

However, the limited solutions for privacy and data ownership tend to come at a price since many entities have capitalized on the growing interest in preserving privacy online. For example, some companies with online users have implemented a "pay-for-privacy" approach that "requires consumers to pay higher fees to avoid data collection and targeted advertisements while offering discounts to consumers who consent to these practices."[5] This makes the ability to opt out of data collection and privacy violations dependent on users' financial ability.

Another option named DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes an individual's personal information from data brokers so that it cannot be sold online. Subscribers can pay $10-20 a month to have DeleteMe experts find and remove their personal information online every 3 months. Again, this type of solution requires users to pay for and rely on a third party in order to exercise control over their data in the digital world.

Frustrations with external parties handling and profiting from their data have led some web users to turn to a very different solution: Web3.

So what's a proposed solution? Enter Web3—a system that promises to return ownership and control to users through decentralization and blockchain technology. Next, I'll explore what Web3 actually is, what it promises, and the values driving its development.

References

1. M. J. Culnan and P. K. Armstrong, "Information Privacy Concerns, Procedural Fairness, and Impersonal Trust: An Empirical Investigation," Organization Science, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 104-115, 1999.

2. J. E. Cohen, "Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object," Stanford Law Review, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 1373-1438, 2000.

3. Federal Trade Commission, "Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability," 2014.

4. T. Christl, "Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life," Cracked Labs, 2017.

5. K. J. Strandburg, "Free Fall: The Online Market's Consumer Preference Disconnect," University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 2013, pp. 95-184, 2013.

6. M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, and T. Graepel, "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 110, no. 15, pp. 5802-5805, 2013.

7. C. Fuchs, "Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance," Surveillance & Society, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 288-309, 2011.

8. C. Fuchs, "Google Capitalism," tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 42-48, 2012.