Privacy | Devonavar

…
From the homicidal bitchin’
that does down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
…
Democracy is coming
to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen

This post is inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, about how money is made of mass surveillance. I’m not overly impressed by the book, but there’s a section describing the Chinese Social Credit system which made me reflect on how we should determine — and how we actually determine — social status.

For the uninitiated, The Social Credit System is a “social score” that measures, in essence, how good a person you are (as determined by the Communist Party of China). It’s compiled automatically, without input or knowledge from the citizens themselves, on the basis of online behaviour: What you buy, who you communicate with, what topics you talk about. It’s enabled by mass surveillance, but the basic idea of keeping dossiers on social behaviour and using them for social control is much older than our current problems with online tracking. Think Stasi, the KGB, and all the stories of secret informants that came out of the Soviet era.

Essentially, it’s a government-run system of social status. Call it a class system (but don’t tell the Communist Party). By Western standards, it’s terrifying and Orwellian, and Zuboff’s description of the system is intended as a dystopia. She quotes the Economist to describe the systems social consequences:

People on the list can be prevented from buying aeroplane, bullet-train or first- or business-class rail tickets; selling, buying or building a house; or enrolling their children in expensive fee-paying schools. There are restrictions on offenders joining or being promoted in the party and army, and on receiving honours and titles.
China invents the digital totalitarian state — Economist — December 17, 2016

She goes on to describe the benefits of having a high social credit score:

Those with high scores receive honours and rewards … They can rent a car without a deposit, receive favourable terms on loans and apartment rentals, receive fast-tracking for visa permits, enjoy being showcased on dating apps, and a host of other perks.
Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p.390

Dystopian it may be, but it got me thinking: How do we distribute the rewards of high social status here in Canada? Who gets social privilege in our society?

The answer should surprise no one: Money. Money is our system of social credit. Only people with money can buy aeroplane tickets or houses, or send their kids to private schools. Perversely, having money will gets you better mortgage terms from the bank or determine whether you qualify for a mortgage at all! We idolize the rich and we act as though the ability to make money is the mark of superior person — the more money, the more superior the person. Not having money is worse — without money, we are deprived of any number of privileges and comforts, including basic human needs like food or shelter.

That got me thinking even more: Is determining social status though wealth really a better system than determining it through social behaviour? Don’t we want to reward the people who act in socially positive ways rather than just rewarding the rich? Does that make the Chinese system better than our own?

I’m not here to defend the Chinese system. I think it’s terrifying. I think most Westerners would prefer equality — a fair system would distribute housing and aeroplane tickets more or less equally, not according to social status. That’s the American dream: Freedom and equality. The ability to make it on your own, no matter who you are.

But I think that’s how we ended up using money to represent social status. We’ve persuaded ourselves that we’ve actually built an equal society, and in doing so we’ve made ourselves blind to the ways that social status is actually determined. We believe in our ideals more than the reality we live in. By saying we have no class system, we have ignored how social status is actually determined. Like it or not, humans are incredibly sensitive to social status, and even the most egalitarian, communal organizations quickly and inevitably create a pecking order. We cannot create a fair system by ignoring status. Somebody has to speak first; someone has to take the first bite. Social status is our way of figuring out who deserves those privileges.

So what are our options? How should we determine social status? What’s fair? I can think of lots of ways that have been tried. Money. Popularity. Age. Heredity. Beauty. Strength. Intelligence. The Chinese system, terrifying as it is, assigns privilege on the basis of moral quality.

On a practical level, we make status judgments on a person-to-person basis. We compare ourselves to each other, and decide for ourselves whether we are superior or inferior, and then modify our behaviour based on that judgment. There are dozens or hundreds of social cues that go into this judgment: All the factors I mentioned above and plenty more. The important thing though, is that it is our judgment. The terrifying thing about the Social Credit system is that the system’s judgment of our worth may not match our own. We may be forced into a status that does not match our self-image. Money is harder to argue with. We may not like the amount we have, but we know how much is there. I’m not sure that makes money a better measure of status, but it may explain why we are more comfortable with it. Or, perhaps we are just more familiar with it.

I’ve struggled to think of a fair way to determine status, and I’m not sure there is one. Our sense of status is given to us by the culture we live in, and it’s immensely difficult to try and change it. There’s nothing about our culture — or any other — that says status has to be fair. Our individual assessments of status may be self-determined, but there are any number of small social pressures that let us know when others disagree with our self-assessed status. If we “choose” a status that doesn’t match social expectations, we may fool a few people (and ourselves), but in the long run, we’ll inevitably come across as foolish or delusional (two very low status images) if we act too far outside our station.

I’m not sure how social status should work, and that bothers me. I started writing this piece because of an intuition that the ways we determine who deserves to be high status could be improved. At the end of the day, I don’t think wealth is a good way to distribute housing and aeroplane tickets, and the idea that they could be distributed on the basis of some higher ideal of social worth appeals to me. At the same time, the Chinese Social Credit System is too horrifying to contemplate. I doubt any centralized institution of social status could be fair or workable. But, if we don’t think consciously about how social status works, we will be at the mercy of those who do, whether they are Chinese software engineers or American capitalists.

Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?

There’s a rule of thumb about clickbait headlines that says if the headline is asking a question, the answer is no. Except in this case, the answer is yes. Yes, Rogers is definitely selling your location data. They are selling your location data even if you are not a Rogers customer; the fact that they run Canada’s largest cellphone network, and one of Canada’s largest ISPs gives them access to pretty much anyone’s location, regardless of whether or not you do business with them.

Who are they selling it to? We already know that Rogers (and every other Canadian telecom) will give your location to law enforcement. Michael Geist reported that

three [Canadian] telecom providers alone disclosed information from 785,000 customer accounts in 2011. Moreover, virtually all providers sought compensation for complying with the requests.

It’s not clear how many of those requests include location data, but I wouldn’t bet against the answer being “most of them”. We already know that Rogers is selling your location to law enforcement.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. Law enforcement’s ability to track your location is a scandal in its own right, but these days, it’s old news. At least law enforcement has the (dubious) justification that it helps them catch “bad guys”. But Rogers isn’t just selling to law enforcement. In fact, they are selling your location data to me.

Now, just to be clear, I have not actually purchased any location data. But I could if I wanted to. The data is definitely for sale, and it’s not for any lack of effort on Rogers’ part that I haven’t made a purchase.

I run a small business. That means I’m on more spam lists than I care to admit, and I receive calls on an almost weekly basis promising to put my website in the top 10 results on Google. Most of these are obvious scams, but recently I received a call from a more professional-sounding organization called Rogers Outrank. For some reason, I agreed to a half-hour sales call to talk about what Rogers could do to promote my business.

I won’t bore you with the details of the sales pitch. Suffice to say that they made the usual promises to put me on the front page of Google’s search results (something Google might be interested in, since their advertising partners are not supposed to guarantee natural search results), and they provided extensive tools to generate sales calls from those results.

One of those tools caught my attention. You can see why in this screenshot from their sales presentation:

This is a map of inbound calls for the campaign. The red pin is supposed to be the location of my business. The blue pins represent people who have called the number associated with the sales campaign. You can drill down and get more detailed information about each caller, including address.

Where does this information come from? My friendly Rogers salesperson had the answer:

So the map is really cool because it lets you see where your leads are going to be calling you from, so if they use a landline, or from a desktop computer, they track the IP address to let us know where that person is calling from, and if it’s a mobile, it’s tracking GPS.

The salesperson assured me I would get this information regardless of who their service provider was:

Same idea, whether they are with Bell, Telus, Koodo — whatever other providers they are — we make sure that when anyone with any sort of brand is looking for your service, our goal is just make sure they are finding you, regardless of whether they are a Rogers client or not.

Let me say this loud and clear: This is creepy. Rogers is selling me the location data of anyone who calls my number, specifically so I can make decisions about how to sell them my services. As a salesperson, that’s really useful, but it’s not an option I should have. As a citizen and a private individual, I don’t want my whereabouts to be available to someone who is selling me something. I don’t want that information to be available to anyone, and Rogers shouldn’t be selling it — especially when I have no business relationship with them.

Now, a few provisos:

It’s a salesperson, so the technical explanation of where the information comes from may not be accurate. For mobile information in particular, I think it’s more likely that the location data comes from tracking SIM cards via cell tower triangulation than directly accessing the cell phone’s GPS.
Likewise, the salesperson doesn’t say outright that I can get addresses for people who don’t use Rogers … he simply implies that “their goal” is to provide me with useful information. But, the map is pretty telling, and I made a point of asking how reliable the information on the map was. He was pretty clear that I could expect to get reliable location data for all my incoming calls.
They aren’t selling location data as a separate product. Technically, Rogers is selling a marketing service, which includes location data as part of the service. I can’t buy the location data separately.
Locations are for inbound calls only. That means I can’t just ask Rogers to track a given phone number; I only get locations for people who I have somehow convinced to call me. But, Rogers’ product is marketing. Their service is specifically designed to convince people to call me.

So, is this legal? I have no idea; I’m not a lawyer. I’d love to hear someone like Michael Geist chime in. My guess: Probably, it’s technically, arguably legal. Rogers has plenty of cash to spend on lawyers. The fact that they are only selling data from incoming calls probably comes with some sort of implied consent. I have no idea how they would get around the fact that non-customers’ data is being sold (and thus, there can be no contractually-waived rights), but lawyers are smart. I’m sure they’d figure something out.

Is it ethical? Hell no. Selling my location, without my knowledge and consent is wrong. I pay my phone company because communicating by phone is a useful, almost essential service. I understand that that privilege entails letting my phone company know where I am, and, by extension, any other phone company whose customers I talk to. I understand that it’s not really possible to build a phone system if you don’t know the location of the phones you are calling. I entrust the companies that run the phone system with my location because it is impossible to build the system without that information.

Selling my location to external parties — making my location public knowledge — is a violation of that trust. Rogers is taking advantage of me. They are taking advantage of you, and everyone else who uses the Canadian phone system. My location does not need to be public knowledge for the phone system to function. It is being made public purely because it is profitable for Rogers to do so.

I wish I could say I knew what to do about this. It’s easy to say “don’t use a phone”, but it’s hardly a practical solution. It’s possible a lawsuit could help stop this particular practice, but that only solves this specific issue; it doesn’t solve the structural issue of abusing private data for profit. It’s possible an industry regulator — the privacy commissioner? — might be able to do something if I complain loudly and often enough.

Honestly, I think the most effective tool is probably public shaming, which is why I wrote this blog post. My hope is that other people — you — will read this, and agree Rogers is doing wrong. And I hope that you will share this post with other people, so those people know what Rogers is doing. Rogers is selling our location data. Their public image should reflect the reality of what they are doing.

Devonavar

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Category Archives: Privacy

Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?