Published on November 4th, 2019 📆 | 8502 Views ⚑
0Edward Snowden at Web Summit: ‘Data isn’t harmless’
Edward Snowden urged tech companies to challenge the practice of widespread data collection by corporations in a speech on Monday, saying not enough progress has been made since he blew the whistle on the National Security Agencyâs (NSA) widespread data scrapping in 2013.
Speaking via video link at the opening of the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Snowden said: âWhether weâre facing about Facebook or the NSA, that is the real problem â we have legalised the abuse of the person through the personal. We have entrenched a system that makes the population vulnerable for the benefit of the privileged.
âWhat do you do when the most powerful institutions in society have become the least accountable to society? I think thatâs the question that our exists generation to answer.â
âPeople are mad at the right people for the wrong reasonsâ
Former CIA contractor Snowden leaked huge tranches of data in 2013 that uncovered widespread data collection by the NSA and other global intelligence services. The leaks highlighted the often indiscriminate collection of data on global populations, much of it collected in concert with global tech companies.
Snowden, who has lived in exile since the leaks, said on Monday that tech companies had made âa faustian bargainâ to do government a favour, without realising that the âtools that had been intended to protect the public had been in many ways used to attack the public.â
Progress has been made identifying the problem since his revelations but there hasnât been enough done to address them, Snowden said.
âAs much as we see the anger rising, as much as I think we see awareness of problems beginning to develop, people are quite frequently mad at the right people for the wrong reasons,â he said.
He said the fundamental problem of data collection had not been addressed, with data collection by the likes of Facebook (FB) and Amazon (AMZN) legal despite concerns.
He added that the rise of âsharing economyâ startups like ride-hailing and rental services had in fact made things worse.
âThe public, my generation, particularly generation after me, they no longer own anything,â Snowden said. âThey are not allowed to own anything. You use these services and they create a permanent record of everything youâve done.
âData isnât harmless, data isnât abstract when itâs about people. Almost all the data being collected today is about people. It is not data that is being exploited, itâs people that are people exploited. Itâs not data in networks being influences or manipulated, it is you being manipulated.â
GDPR âa paper tigerâ
Snowden said there has been a âconcentration of powerâ among big tech companies since his revelations.
âWhen we see governments and corporations working in concert, we begin to see the birth of a complex between the two where neither truly acts independently or adversarially, but rather they become the left and the right hand of the same body,â Snowden said.
Europe introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) last year aimed at curbing abuses of customer data. Snowden said it was âa good first effort⊠but itâs not a solution.â
The legislation misdiagnosed the problems, he said, and should in fact tackle the collection of data, not its protection once collected.
As a result, GDPR is âa paper tigerâ that gives âa false sense of insurance,â he said.
The downbeat speech was given to a capacity crowd at the 20,000 Altice Arena in Lisbon, made up largely of tech professions. Asked what could be done to address the problems he diagnosed, Snowden called for more encryption and a fundamental re-thinking of data collection practices.
âRather than asking people to trust you⊠show them why they donât have to trust you,â Snowden said. âThe only way to protect anyone is to protect everyone.â
He added that technology is âlargely value neutralâ and it was only the abuse of technology that created problems, not the existence of technology itself.
Gloss