While Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed in the US presidential election in spring 2016, a series of events that came to be known as the Digital Gold Rush started in a small town in North Macedonia.
A group of young people built websites that spread disinformation. Clinton’s supporters were served fake news about Trump, while Trump’s supporters were served fake news about Clinton. The youngsters’ motives were not political, but economic: through Google’s AdSense advertising system, they were able to earn money significantly above the average salary in North Macedonia. Google paid the website administrators based on the number of visitors. The more visitors to the site, the higher the revenue. Visitors to the site were attracted from Facebook groups by coming up with the most imaginative clickbait titles. Facebook also benefited financially from these Macedonian troll farms.
Data about consumers’ online behaviour, or online data, is a central product in today’s market economy. Already in 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby described data as the oil of this millennium. Like oil, data is not valuable in itself. What is valuable is what you can do with it.
The information collected by means of data analytics is used to predict the behaviour of the network user. Equations, or algorithms, are created that correspond to their previous behaviour. The algorithm is based on machine learning.
Algorithms control what the user sees next in the service. The user is presented with more customised content, which may make it easier to find information of interest amongst large masses of information. On the other hand, it is difficult to grasp the big picture, and things that deviate from one’s own perceptions do not come up, but rather things that reinforce them.
When different online services request login and registration, profiled personal data packages are obtained and then sold on. The rights to use the images and videos entered into the services are also transferred to the company responsible for the service. In other words, there is no free information, but the network users’ own activities become a commodity.
Protecting information online and limiting what content is disclosed to the services of technology giants is everyone’s own responsibility.
Cookies store our activity each time we accept them. So, it does matter whether we accept only the necessary cookies or all marketing cookies.
In recent years, the EU has increased regulation on the data economy. The drafting of the legislation is a balancing act between, on the one hand, the principles of freedom of expression and free market competition and, on the other hand, the principles of the security and individual protection of network users.