WikiLeaks is a non-commercial Internet whistle-blowing platform that is online since 2006. It was founded by Julian Assange and is funded by online donations. Whistleblowers can upload documents that are intended to make misbehaviour and crimes of governments and corporations transparent, i.e. visible in the public. One can upload such documents anonymously by making use of an online submission form. WikiLeaks’s main servers are based in Sweden.

The power elite – large corporations, governments, and military institutions –distinguishes itself from ordinary citizens and most civil society organizations by two features: these actors have a lot of economic and political power, which allows them to strongly shape our world. They also have the resources to keep parts of their activities invisible. Therefore for example corporate crime frequently remains undetected. The topic that made the news about WikiLeaks in late July 2010 was that the platform published more than 90 000 top-secret documents (reports of soldiers about operations, protocols of surveillance operations, etc) from American military sources about military operations in Afghanistan.

According to news sources (Der Spiegel, 30/2010, pp. 70-86), the documents:

- show that and how special command forces like the US Task Force 373 have killed enemies that are defined on death lists
- document failed operations (including death of civilians)
- document that the Americans and their allies are facing serious problems in the military conflict with the Taliban and Al Qaeda
- document that unmanned fighter drones used in Afghanistan are error prone and have had many accidents

Following the leak of the Afghanistan documents, US government representatives and conservative commentators heavily criticized WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. US National Security Adviser General James Jones said that WikiLeaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security”. Mike Millen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family”. Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, argued in the Washington Post that WikiLeaks “is a criminal enterprise”, constitutes “material support for terrorism”, and that the “Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents – and its leadership brought to justice” .

Such statements are strongly twisting reality. They are ideology at its purest. War is always about killing the enemy. In Afghanistan, US soldiers and their allies kill military enemies and, as is known not only since the WikiLeaks documents, this has also resulted in numerous civilian casualties, and Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters kill US and allied soldiers as well as Afghan civilians by suicide attacks. This double-sided violence has created a spiral of attacks and counter-attacks that sadly has caused many casualties. Violence is not caused by the materials published by WikiLeaks that document violence, it is caused by the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves. One gets the impression that the US government thinks that military violence does not exist if it is unknown. One is reminded here of the US coverage of anti-Iraq war protests in many US mainstream media, where the protesters were described with terms such as anarchists, violent mob, vandals, rioters, mayhem, chaos, aggressive, etc and the impression was invoked that the main violent problem is not the war itself, but those protesting against the war.

The truth about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents is that the platform has the potential to make visible the scale of brutality, violence, and horror of warfare and military conflicts. To uncover and document such realities is uncomfortable for those powerful actors, who want to twist reality by making what really happened in the daily reality of war, corporate crime, and corporate and government corruption unknown. WikiLeaks is a project that makes unknown reality known, it transforms that which is kept secret and invisible by governments and corporations into visible reality.  WikiLeaks can be seen as an alternative media project: it tries to provide information that uncovers the misuse of power by powerful actors, it is an Internet-based medium that enables critiques of power structures.

Power is based on a dialectic of visibility and invisibility: powerful actors want to make their enemies and opponents visible, while they want to remain themselves invisible. They engage in surveillance in order to make visible and in order to keep their own operations and gathered information invisible. Power is always related to making information about enemies and opponents visible, while at the same time making and keeping the collected information intransparent, inaccessible, and secret. WikiLeaks cuts into the power dialectic of visibility of the surveilled and invisibility of the powerful by helping to make invisible power structures visible. This is itself a process of power-making and power-generation because these are processes that try to force visibility on the powerful. WikiLeaks engages in watching the powerful by making their operations and the information gathered by surveillance operations of the powerful visible. During the Vietnam war, television made visible the horror of the killing fields that would have otherwise remained invisible. In a similar fashion, WikiLeaks has made visible hidden and secret realities of warfare today.

WikiLeaks is not politically value-free and neutral in its operations, but no journalist and no medium is neutral, but rather always politically biased because how things are reported, what is not reported, which priority is given to certain stories, which quotation by which person is mentioned first in a story, how often a certain opinion is mentioned in a story, how advertising and funding influences the basic framework of a medium, etc are all political biases. Therefore the publication of the Afghanistan documents on WikiLeaks is certainly a political move intended to help putting and end to the war in Afghanistan. It is political in the same sense that any news article and any TV news report about the Afghan report carries political messages, interests, and intentions. It is politically honest when Julian Assange talks openly about his anti-war motivations in an interview with Der Spiegel: “This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence. […] There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won’t do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner. […] The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped”. Political honesty is a virtue that many politicians and newsmakers are all too often missing.

Of course it could happen that WikiLeaks publishes fake material. But this can happen and does happen in any mass medium. There are no reasons to assume that it should happen more often on WikiLeaks than in corporate mass media. To the contrary, WikiLeaks does not have the advertising and financial pressure characteristic for the corporate mass media that Chomsky and Herman have characterized as propagandistic filters that distort news reporting. Therefore one should be less concerned about manipulated information on WikiLeaks than one should be concerned about media manipulation in the corporate mass media.

WikiLeaks defines itself in its self-description first of all as a liberal project that protects freedom of speech and tries to strengthen democracy by making government corruption visible: “WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. […] We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly – in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances – the internet, and cryptography – the risks of conveying important information can be lowered. […] We believe that it is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government. That is why the time has come for an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem of the WikiLeak self-description is that in the first third of the text, only documenting government corruption is mentioned, whereas documenting corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes is not. This creates the impression that corrupt governments are the main problem of our world, but not also or not even more corrupt and criminal corporations. The document in its first third conveys a liberal impression that talks about the problems of big government and at the same time – or even by doing so – ignores the problems of capitalism. Fortunately the self-description then takes a twist in a section titled “Does WikiLeaks support corporate whistleblowers?”, where the need for documenting corporate crimes and corporate irresponsibility is discussed:

“It is increasingly obvious that corporate fraud must be effectively addressed. Corporate corruption comes in many forms. […] The number of employees and turnover of some corporations exceeds the population and GDP of some nation states. When comparing countries, after observations of population size and GDP, it is usual to compare the system of government, the major power groupings and the civic freedoms available to their populations. Such comparisons can also be illuminating in the case of corporations. […] While having a GDP and population comparable to Belgium, Denmark or New Zealand, many of these multi-national corporations have nothing like their quality of civic freedoms and protections. This is even more striking when the regional civic laws the company operates under are weak (such as in West Papua, many African states or even South Korea); there, the character of these corporate tyrannies is unobscured by their civilizing surroundings. Through governmental corruption, political influence, or manipulation of the judicial system, abusive corporations are able to gain control over the defining element of government — the sole right to deploy coercive force” (WikiLeaks self-description).

So WikiLeaks fortunately finally makes clear that it explicitly is not only a government watchdog, but also a corporate watchdog. But the first time that corporations are mentioned at all and at the same time mentioned as governments comes relatively late in the document, namely in the passage which says that the “power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem that remains is that in the WikiLeaks self-description, corporate crimes and corporate corruption are only mentioned late, whereas government power is mentioned in the second paragraph. Another problem is the assumption that it is possible to civilize corporations:

“WikiLeaks endeavors to civilize corporations by exposing uncivil plans and behavior. Just like a country, a corrupt or unethical corporation is a menace to all inside and outside it” (WikiLeaks self-description). One can hear daily stories about corporate irresponsibility: stories such as the one that British Petrol caused one of the worst ecological disasters are in all news, that iPods and iPads are produced in China under inhumane conditions by workers who commit suicide because they cannot stand the working conditions, etc cannot be overheard in the media, there are daily stories about child labour, precarious labour conditions, etc. The problem is that such a multitude of stories, and WikiLeaks here is no exception and directly admits this in its self-description, makes us believe that corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes against humanity are the exception from the rule and can therefore be fixed within capitalism by “civilizing corporations”. But what if corporations are uncivilized as such, if their behaviour is always exploitative and irresponsible? Then capitalism and corporations cannot be civilized, and exposing uncivil plans and behaviour should be aimed at transforming and civilizing the whole.

I applaud the critical political potential of WikiLeaks as corporate and government-Internet watchdog, but think that WikiLeaks’s self-description and self-understanding should be changed as soon as possible.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quoted saying: “The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people – and it runs into all these privacy concerns”. He acknowledges that some people have “the vision of a surveillance world”. But he associates Google, not Facebook with surveillance. He says that Google’s strategy of data collection “is a little scary” and thinks that Facebook in contrast gives users control over their data. “Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system”.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he does not care about profit, but wants to help people with Facebook’s tools and wants to create an open society. Kevin Colleran, Facebook advertising sale executive, says in the Wired story that “Mark is not motivated by money”. In a story by the Times (October 20, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article4974197.ece), Zuckerberg said: “The goal of the company is to help people to share more in order to make the world more open and to help promote understanding between people. The long-term belief is that if we can succeed in this mission then we also be able to build a pretty good business and everyone can be financially rewarded. […] The Times: Does money motivate you. Zuckerberg: No”.

Zuckerberg thinks that the only problem about Facebook surveillance is that other individuals get access to images or information of users that is not meant for being available to them. He also thinks that privacy control options will solve this problem. Facebook has tended to make ever more information available to all users as its standard setting. One cannot assume that all users are highly skilful in setting their privacy options. Zuckerberg ignores the skills divide in social networking site usage.

But the more crucial problem is that Zuckerberg fully ignores the economic power structures of the modern economy, into which Facebook is embedded. If Zuckerberg really does not care about profit, why is Facebook then not a non-commercial platform and why does it use targeted advertising? The problems of targeted advertising are that it aims at controlling and manipulating human needs, that users are normally not asked if they agree to the use of advertising on the Internet, but have to agree to advertising if they want to use commercial platforms (lack of democracy), that advertising can increase market concentration, that it is intransparent for most users what kind of information about them is used for advertising purposes, and that users are not paid for the value creation they engage in when using commercial web 2.0 platforms and uploading data. Surveillance on Facebook is not only an interpersonal process, where users view data about other individuals that might benefit or harm the latter, it is primarily economic surveillance, i.e. the collection, storage, assessment, and commodification of personal data, usage behaviour, and user-generated data for economic purposes. Facebook and other web 2.0 platforms are large advertising-based capital accumulation machines that achieve their economic aims by economic surveillance.

Facebook collects information about user behaviour on other sites for economic purposes: “We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as ‘conversion tracking,’ helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see. We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads“ (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Facebook targets advertisement to individual users by surveilling their usage behaviour and interests: “We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. […] We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your friends to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. For example, if you connect with your favorite band’s page, we may display your name and profile photo next to an advertisement for that page that is displayed to your friends. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the friend who can see the ad. You can opt out of having your information used in social ads on this help page” (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Zuckerberg and Facebook ignore concerns about advertising settings. Facebook’s privacy policy is the living proof that Facebook is primarily about profit-generation by advertising. “The world will be better if you share more“? For whom, Mark Zuckerberg? “Sharing” on Facebook in economic terms means primarily that Facebook “shares” information with advertising clients. And “sharing” is only the euphemism for selling and commodifying data. Facebook commodifies and trades user data and user behaviour data. Facebook does not make the world a better place, it makes the world a more commercialized place, a big shopping mall without exit. It makes the world only a better place for companies interested in advertising, not for users.

Mr. Zuckerberg, if you are a man who stands by his word, and Facebook for you is really not about profit, then please abolish targeted advertising and any kind of advertising on Facebook tomorrow and transform Facebook into a non-commercial, non-profit Internet platform. Yours truly, Christian Fuchs.

Google does not give a viable explanation why it collected data from WiFi networks. The company wrote on its blog: “So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software – although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Is it reasonable to assume that a software code that collects private data is accidently installed and nobody knows about it? Can this statement be trusted if it comes from a company that naturally has an economic interest in turning data into profit?

The collected data enables Google to link certain images, videos, some details about private lives, work and business, and personal documents to addresses. No matter if Google uses these data for economic purposes, statistical analysis, or does not use them, the question is if citizens can feel save when a corporation that by its own nature has capital accumulation as its highest priority (which does in reality frequently conflict with citizens’ interests), collects and controls such data without the knowledge and agreement of users. Google says that it has or will delete all collected data. But if this is indeed true, cannot be controlled. Even if public prosecution authorities and data protection agencies gain access to Google hard disks that contain these data, it cannot be guaranteed that data copies have not been made. Once data is collected and controlled by one actor, it can be easily, cheaply and very quickly copied. This means that one cannot trust Google’s assertions that it has or will delete the data because there can never be certainty about the deletion of digital data. Damage has already been irreversibly caused at the moment the data were collected because of the very nature of digitalization that allows the creation of an endless number of exact data doubles.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Google’s naïve apology is not worth a tinker’s cuss because the affected users can never be sure what exactly has happened or will happen to their data and if this will have negative consequences for them.

The incident shows that Google has an interest in obtaining as much data about users as possible and that it does not shy away from collecting data without the knowledge and consent of users and even from private networks.

“This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Because a network is open does not mean that companies should be allowed to download data from the network and that users welcome them to do so. Some observers argue that if someone leaves a wireless network open/unprotected, it is his/her own fault if others extract data from it. They also say that leaving a wireless network open is like writing a postcard or not sealing a letter, which invites others to read. Why is this analogy inappropriate? Open wireless networks advance free access and the sharing of data, which in turn fosters human communication, which is a basic human need that should not cost money. Therefore open networks as such are desirable. If all providers close their wireless networks off from the public, costless public access to information and communication over the Internet is disabled and industry interests in charging users for Internet access is advanced. Therefore there are good reasons for providing open access to wireless networks. Other reasons for not protecting wireless networks are that people want to share data with people in their flat, their house, or their block, which does not mean that they want to share it with Google. Also some users might not know or not be sure which data on their computers and networks is available to others. If you do not lock your door because you want your friends who live next door to be able to enter any time, then this does not mean that you welcome strangers to come in and take pictures of you sleeping, having sex, sitting on the toilet, lying in the bathtub, or conducting other activities.

I am sure that most Internet users have found it useful to browse streets on Google Street View before going to a place they have never been to in order to easier orient themselves and gain an idea of how the place they are going to looks like. This shows the power of contemporary Internet technologies to serve basic human needs such as communication, co-ordination, and orientation. But at the same times these technologies under the control of profit-oriented firms serve economic interests that conflict with basic human interests. Google has a contradictory nature: it advances human sociability and communication and at the same time threatens data protection due to its profit-oriented character. There is an antagonism between the productive power of Internet technologies and the capitalist relations that shape the production and usage of these technologies.

The German consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner has enforced that Google must garble private houses and gardens on Google Street View if citizens formally object. This debate is itself contradictory: if all houses are gabled on Google Street View, then users will get no impression of how a certain ward they want to go to looks like; if all houses are visible, certain people might feel that criminal acts and acts of terrorism are easier to plan.

In Germany, the Hamburg public prosecution authority started investigations against Google because of the suspicion that the company intercepted data. In Austria, the Data Protection Commission banned further data collection by Google Street View at the end of May 2010. Josef Ostermayer, who is Austrian State Secretary for the Media, wants to criminalize illegal data collection (Der Standard, May 28, 2010). Currently, unauthorized data collection is only illegal if the data are purposefully collected and valorized for economic purposes. Ostermayer wants to criminalize unauthorized data collection so that not only the use of such data for profit-purposes is illegal, but already the gathering process itself. He also suggests that there should not only be a national law, but that the EU Data Protection Directive is amended (Der Standard, May 28, 2010).

The best reaction to surveillance by private companies, as in the case of Google, is to let them feel the full violence of democratic law enforcement. Therefore the current developments in Austrian and Germany of taking legal measures against Google are more than appropriate. Corporations may not be very willing to voluntarily respect the consumer interest in data protection, but they may become more responsive if corporate data misuse is criminalized, severely punished, and causes painful financial losses for them. The Google Street View incident shows that companies do not automatically see privacy violation as a mistake and that legal measures that make companies like Google and Facebook learn privacy lessons are very much needed. Maybe it is time to stop talking about corporate social responsibility and to start focusing on the analysis, exposure, and investigation of corporate social irresponsibility.

Data retention was implemented in Germany (and other European countries) after the European Commission passed the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) on March 15, 2006, which requires all member states to pass laws that guarantee that information and communication service providers store source, destination, and other data on a communication for at least 6 months. The data that needs to be stored includes:
“(a) data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication (…)
(b) data necessary to identify the destination of a communication (…)
(c) data necessary to identify the date, time and duration of a communication (…)
(d) data necessary to identify the type of communication (…)
(e) data necessary to identify users’ communication equipment or what purports to be their equipment
(f) data necessary to identify the location of mobile communication equipment“ (European Data Retention Directive, Article 5).
“Member States shall ensure that the categories of data specified in Article 5 are retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication“ (European Data Retention Directive, Article 6).

The German Federal Constitutional Court considers the following articles of German jurisdiction as unconstitutional:
* §113a (1) TKG (telecommunication act, Telekommunikationsgesetz): “Providers of publicly accessible telecommunication services are obliged according to paragraphs 2-5 to store connection data that are produced or processed in the usage of its service for six months nationally or in another member state of the European Union” („Wer öffentlich zugängliche Telekommunikationsdienste für Endnutzer erbringt, ist verpflichtet, von ihm bei der Nutzung seines Dienstes erzeugte oder verarbeitete Verkehrsdaten nach Maßgabe der Absätze 2 bis 5 sechs Monate im Inland oder in einem anderen Mitgliedstaat der Europäischen Union zu speichern“).
* §113b TKG says that telecommunication service providers are allowed to provide these connection data to law enforcement agencies, German secret services, and offices for the protection of the constitution if in the specific case an investigation is court-ordered.
* § 100g SPO (code of criminal procedure, Strafprozessordnung) says that if someone has committed a crime, tries to commit a crime, or prepares to commit a crime, especially severe crimes according to § 100a SPO, “connection data can be investigated, also without knowledge of the person concerned, insofar as this is necessary for the investigation of the statement of affairs or of the whereabouts of the defendant“ („so dürfen auch ohne Wissen des Betroffenen Verkehrsdaten (§ 96 Abs. 1, § 113a des Telekommunikationsgesetzes) erhoben werden, soweit dies für die Erforschung des Sachverhalts oder die Ermittlung des Aufenthaltsortes des Beschuldigten erforderlich ist“).

These articles in the view of the German Federal Constitutional Court violate §10 (1) of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz), which protects the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications: “The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable“ („Das Briefgeheimnis sowie das Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis sind unverletzlich“).

This decision is in my view important in several respects:

* It shows that putting all citizens under general suspicion of being criminals or terrorists or of potentially planning to be criminals or terrorists and as a result storing data on their communicative connections may not be compatible with basic human rights.

* It shows the importance of constitutional laws and human rights in circumventing the rise of totalitarian surveillance societies.

* It puts an interesting perspective on the relationship of national and international jurisdiction: Directives of the European Commission are obligatory for all member states and therefore result in the creation or amendment of certain laws and paragraphs in all states. In this case international law shapes national law. But after the decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court, it is likely that the Data Retention Directive will be reconsidered at the European level, which may result in its amendment or abolishment. This shows that important national court decisions have the power to shape international laws.

The President of the German Federal Constitutional Court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, commented in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung: “The Federal Constitutional Court has found that the prohibition of total surveillance is part of Germany’s constitution and its principle must not be negated by European legislation“ („Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat festgestellt, dass das Verbot einer Totalüberwachung zur Identität der Verfassung Deutschlands gehört und auch von der europäischen Gesetzgebung nicht im Grundsatz negiert werden darf“, Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 6+7, 2010, page 6, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/1/505205/text/).

The German Federal Constitutional Court has expressed concerns about total surveillance in its decision. It argues that data retention allows creating personal profiles (interests, weaknesses, preferences, political and other memberships). This may cause feelings of being under surveillance and under constant threat. “Even although storage does not extend to communication contents, these data allow to draw conclusions that reach into the private sphere. Addressees, dates, time, and place of telephone conversations allow, if they are observed for a longer duration, in their combination detailed information about societal or political affiliations as well as personal preferences, affinities, and weaknesses. Depending on the usage of telecommunications, such a storage can enable the creation of significant personal profiles or profiles of movements of practically every citizen. Also the risk increases that citizens are put under further investigations without giving reasons for this themselves. Furthermore potential abuses connected with such data collections aggravate their mental stress effects. Particularly as storage and data use is not noticed, the storage of telecommunication connection data for no reason is suited to cause a diffusely threatening feeling of being under observation that can diminish an unprejudiced perception of one’s basic rights in many areas“ („Auch wenn sich die Speicherung nicht auf die Kommunikationsinhalte erstreckt, lassen sich aus diesen Daten bis in die Intimsphäre hineinreichende inhaltliche Rückschlüsse ziehen. Adressaten, Daten, Uhrzeit und Ort von Telefongesprächen erlauben, wenn sie über einen längeren Zeitraum beobachtet werden, in ihrer Kombination detaillierte Aussagen zu gesellschaftlichen oder politischen Zugehörigkeiten sowie persönlichen Vorlieben, Neigungen und Schwächen. Je nach Nutzung der Telekommunikation kann eine solche Speicherung die Erstellung aussagekräftiger Persönlichkeits und Bewegungsprofile praktisch jeden Bürgers ermöglichen. Auch steigt das Risiko von Bürgern, weiteren Ermittlungen ausgesetzt zu werden, ohne selbst hierzu Anlass gegeben zu haben. Darüber hinaus verschärfen die Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten, die mit einer solchen Datensammlung verbunden sind, deren belastende Wirkung. Zumal die Speicherung und Datenverwendung nicht bemerkt werden, ist die anlasslose Speicherung von Telekommunikationsverkehrsdaten geeignet, ein diffus bedrohliches Gefühl des Beobachtetseins hervorzurufen, das eine unbefangene Wahrnehmung der
Grundrechte in vielen Bereichen beeinträchtigen kann“, decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court, March 2, 2010, http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/pressemitteilungen/bvg10-011).

The German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision gives hope that the emergence of a total European surveillance society can be circumvented.

See also connected to this topic:
Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.
Link

Interviewees included: Chris Anderson (Wired magazine), John Battelle (author of “The Search”), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), danah boyd (Microsoft Research), Shami Chakrabarti (director of the civil rights group Liberty), Stephen Fry (actor, writer, director, presenter), David Gallagher (New York Times), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Seth Goldstein (Attention Trust), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Andrew Keen (author of “The Cult of the Amateur”), Martha Lane Fox (lastminute.com), James Marcus (Amazon), Douglas Rushkoff (author of “Life Inc”), Eric Schmidt (Google), Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton), Terry Winograd (Stanford University), Steve Wozniak (Apple).

The documentary maintains that online activities like searching on Google, uploading pictures on Flickr, or using social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspae, seem to be free, but come at a price: the disclosure of private information to companies that sell these data to advertising clients in order to make money profit.

Amazon is presented as one of the early pioneers that advanced the commercialization of the web in the 1990s. Google is seen as big money-making machine that makes use of the ethos of free access to information, turns users into commodities, and is building a monopoly in Internet advertising. The documentary also presents the case of AOL that in 2006 released a file that contained the searches 650,000 users made over a period of three months. The file did not contain the names of the persons who conducted the searches, but the data was so intimate that in many cases it allowed the identification of the users.

The documentary shows that officials of Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, or Netflix tend to argue that targeted advertising and targeted recommendation systems that are based on online data surveillance enrich the users’ experience and provide them with information that they could find interesting. It is no accident, that there is so much talk about the importance of user experience in the Internet industry and in Human Computer Interaction research. So for example, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of the online movie provider Netflix, says: “It is all about pleasing the consumer”. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says: “The average person seems very pragmatic about it. As long as it works and as long as all the laws are followed, they seem perfectly happy to share personal information to make their experience better”. However, there are many voices in this documentary that express doubts about these positive views.

The maker of the documentary, Aleks Krotoski, maintains that our “thoughts and desires that we express online are being traced, tracked, and traded in pursuit of profit”. She speaks of the ”brave new web” and remarks: “In return for our free web, our privacy has become a commodity. We are economic units in what has become the new commercial frontier”. Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Life Inc”, says: “The product online is not the content, the product online is you!”. “And the darker side of the web, to some extent includes the ability of those behind the screen, those who are providing this space for you, to monitor you”, argues Shami Chakrabarati, who is director of the civil rights group Liberty.

Krotoski quotes from a research paper of the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm”. Google today no longer stays in line with these intellectual roots, it stores and analyzes all information searches in order to sell targeted advertisings.

In my view the documentary does not make exactly clear what the problem of the large-scale surveillance of information behaviour on the Internet by companies actually is. Is surveillance the problem as such? Is it an intrinsic or extrinsic problem? If it is extrinsic, then surveillance needs to be seen as constituting a problem in relation to its societal context. One can imagine societies, where voluntary sharing of personal data and resulting data collection and storage does not bring potential disadvantages such as job loss, an advertising spam flood, stalking, harassment, etc. But unfortunately we do not live in such a world, and therefore privacy protection mechanisms are needed. The implications of surveillance in a stratified world are causing problems. Stratification of modern societies means that certain groups and individuals compete for the control and increase of resourses. Therefore they have to consider others as their opponents. Certain groups and individuals benefit from certain circumstances at the expense of others. Such competitive relations can be found in all realms of modern society, such as the economy, politics, culture, and personal relations. Given competitive relations, information about personal preferences and individual behaviour can cause harm to individuals if it gets into the hands of their opponents or others who might have an interest in harming them. Large-scale data gathering and surveillance in a society that is based on the principle of competition poses certain threats to the well-being of all citizens. Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others. If such collections are owned privately, then access to data might be sold because there is an economic interest in accumulating money.

Another problem of online data surveillance by corporations is that it is inherently linked to economic class formation and exploitation. I have described this circumstance in more detail in a recent paper that was published by the journal Media, Culture & Society: Fuchs, Christian. 2010. Class, knowledge and new media. Media, Culture & Society 32 (1): 141-150 (http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/32/1/141).

I argue in this paper that obviously targeted online advertising produces money profit for Internet corporations and that therefore the question arises, who creates economic value on web 2.0. Critical political economist Dallas Smythe in his seminal paper “On the audience commodity and its work” suggested that advertising business models of the media are not primarily based on the commodification of content, but the commodification of the audience. Although also content may be sold as a commodity (you buy a newspaper or magazine for 1 euro, etc), the primary source of economic value for many commercial media is that they sell their audience to advertising clients and thereby accumulate capital. With the rise of user-generated content and free access social networking platforms and other free access platforms that yield profit by online advertisement, the world wide web seems to come close to accumulation strategies employed by the capital on traditional mass media like TV or radio.

The users who google data, upload or watch videos on YouTube, upload or browse personal images on Flickr, or accumulate friends with whom they exchange content or communicate online via social networking platforms like MySpace or Facebook, constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet is that in the latter the users are also content producers; there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building and content-production. That the users are more active on the Internet than in the reception of TV or radio content is due to the decentralized structure of the Internet, which allows many-to-many communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as producers, I would argue, in the case of the Internet, that the audience commodity is a produser commodity. The category of the produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity. Much of the time spent online produces profit for large corporations like Google, News Corp. (which owns MySpace), or Yahoo! (which owns Flickr). Advertisements on the Internet are frequently personalized; this is made possible by surveilling, storing and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases. This is another difference from TV and radio, which provide less individualized content and advertisements due to their more centralized structure.

I have argued in my book “Internet and Society” that in the digital economy we find an antagonism between the networked productive forces and the class-based relations of production that are based on private ownership. We can observe this very well in the case of Google and other web 2.0 platforms. At the level of the technological productive forces, we see that Google advances socialization, the co-operative and common character of the online-productive forces: Google tools are available for free, Google Documents allows the collaborative creation of documents; GMail, Blogger, and Buzz enable social networking and communication, YouTube supports sharing videos, Google Scholar and Google Books help better access worldwide academic knowledge, etc. These are all applications that can give great benefits to humans. But at the level of the relations of production, Google is a profit-oriented, advertising-financed money-making machine that turns users and their personal data into a commodity. And the result is large-scale surveillance and the immanent undermining of liberal democracy’s intrinsic privacy value. Liberal democratic values thereby constitute their own limit and immanent critique.

So on the level of the productive forces, Google and other web 2.0 platforms anticipate a commons-based public Internet from which all benefit, whereas the freedom (free service access) that it provides is now enabled by online surveillance and user commodification that threatens privacy. Google is a nice prototypical example for the antagonisms between networked productive forces and capitalist relations of production of the information economy.

But are there alternatives?

Eben Moglen, who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, gave a talk on “Freedom in the cloud: software freedom, privacy and security for web 2.0 and cloud computing” on February 5, 2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA). He suggested an Internet architecture, in which every user has a personal web server that s/he can put in his/her pocket, plug in at any place, that stores all personal online data, keeps log files, connects to the Internet, and sends encrypted back-ups of data to the users’ friends servers in case that they communicate with them. The architecture would be easy to realize, all hardware and systems, and software would be available and could be operated with the help of free software. Moglen describes a way for restoring the autonomy of users as owners of their data. If such an Internet architecture is implemented, this will inevitably require struggles for the release of personal data to users and the cleanup of these data on the servers of Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, etc because one can bet that these corporations will rather be unwilling to decommodify the Internet prosumer commodity.

In February 2010, Google introduced a new social networking service called Buzz. Buzz is directly connected to GMail, Google’s webmail-platform. Google’s introduction of Buzz is an attempt to gain importance in the social networking sites-market that has been dominated by Facebook and Twitter. In February 2010, Facebook was ranked number 2 and Twitter number 12 in the list of the most accessed web platforms, whereas Google’s own social networking platform Orkut, which is only very popular in Brazil, was at number 52 (data source: http://alexa.com, the top 500 sites on the web, February 14, 2010). Popular social networking platforms attract millions of users, who upload and share personal information that provides data about their consumption preferences. Therefore commercial social networking sites are keen on storing, analyzing, and selling individual and aggregated data about user preferences and user behaviour to advertising clients in order to accumulate capital. Google is itself a main player in the business of online advertising. One can therefore assume that Google considers Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms that attract many users, as competitors, and that as a result of this competitive situation Google has introduced Buzz. In 2009, GMail had approximately 150 million users (see http://www.tech24hours.com/2009/09/number-of-gmail-users-worldwide-as-of.html, accessed on February 14, 2010), which explains that Google integrated Buzz into GMail in order to start from a solid foundation of potential users.

Buzz supports the following communicative functions: the creation of postings that are shared with contacts, the sharing of images and videos, commenting and evaluating others’ Buzz posts, the forwarding of Twitter messages to a Buzz account, linking and integrating images uploaded to Flickr or Picasa, videos uploaded to YouTube, and posts generated on Blogger; the usage of Buzz via mobile phones. Buzz messages can either be presented publicly or only to selected groups of followers. Each user’s Buzz profile has a list of followers. Users can select which Buzz accounts they want to follow. Buzz mobile phone messages include geo-tags that display the current location of users. Buzz posts of users who are geographically located nearby a user and information about nearby sites, shops, restaurants, etc can be displayed on mobile phones. Buzz also recommends postings by others users.

In December 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt commented about online privacy: “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew, accessed on February 14, 2010). This statement is an indication that Google or at least its most important managers and shareholders do not value privacy very highly. Schmidt’s statement implies that he thinks that in the online world, all uploaded information and personal data should be available publicly and should be usable by corporations for economic ends.

When first installing Buzz, the application automatically generated a list of followers for each user based on the most frequent GMail mail contacts. The standard setting was that this list of followers was automatically visible in public. This design move resulted in heavy criticism of Google in the days following the launch of Buzz. Users and civil rights advocates argued that Buzz threatens the privacy of users and makes contacts that users might want to keep private available in public. Google reacted to public criticism (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/13/buzz-changes-google-drops_n_461656.html, accessed on February 14, 2010) and changed some of the standard settings of Buzz on February 13, 2010. Some changes were made to the auto-follow option, so that now a dialogue is displayed that shows which users Buzz suggests as followers (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 14, 2010). But still all suggested followers are automatically activated, which does not make this solution an opt-in version of the follow feature. Google also said that Buzz would no longer automatically connect publicly available Picasa and Google Reader items to the application. Also an options menu was announced that allows users to hide their contact list from their public Google profiles. The problem here is again that this was planned as an opt-out solution, and not as an opt-in option (see: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 14, 2010). From a privacy-enhancing perspective, opt-in solutions are preferable to opt-out solutions because they give users more control over what applications are allowed to do with their data. However, it is clear that opt-in solutions are rather unpopular design options for many Internet corporations because they tend to reduce the number of potential users that are subject to advertising-oriented data surveillance.

At the Google Buzz launch event on February 9, 2010, the presenters were keen on stressing the advantages that Buzz poses for users. Bradley Horwitz, Google vice president of product marketing, spoke of Buzz as “a Google approach to sharing” and a tool that will “help you manage your attention better” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuThg91-4Nw, accessed on February 15, 2010). There was no talk about potential disadvantages. When in the question and answer section of the event, the first question that came about was about privacy issues, Buzz product manager Todd Jackson answered: “There is a lot of controls in there for users. […] There are ways to control the settings you are revealing to other people” (ibid.). Four days later, following a public discussion about the surveillance and privacy threats of Buzz, Google sounded much less optimistic. On the Google GMail blog, Todd Jackson wrote: “We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised” (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html, accessed on February 15, 2010).

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. As a result, more and more precise user data and aggregated data can be sold to advertising clients that provide the users with personalized advertising that targets them in all of these everyday situations with information about potential consumption choices. The introduction of ever more applications does primarily serve economic ends that are realized by large-scale user surveillance. As more and more people access the Internet from their mobile phones, the number of times and the time spans users are online as well as the number of access points and situations in which users are online increase. Therefore supplying applications that are attractive for users in all of these circumstances (such as waiting for the bus or the underground, travelling on the train or the airplane, going to a restaurant, concert, or movie, visiting friends, attending a business meeting, etc), promises that users spend more time online with applications supplied by specific companies such as Google, which allows these companies to present more advertisements that are more individually targeted to users, which in turn promises more profit for the companies. We can therefore say that there is a strong economic incentive for Google’s and other companies’ introduction of new Internet- and mobile Internet-applications.

Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. It gathers information about user behaviour and user interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to advertising clients. These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the Buzz privacy policy, which says for example: “When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services. […] If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google” (Google Buzz Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).

Google uses DoubleClick – a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There is only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. The Google privacy policy says in this context: “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web. You can view, edit, and manage your ads preferences associated with this cookie by accessing the Ads Preferences Manager. In addition, you may choose to opt out of the DoubleClick cookie at any time by using DoubleClick’s opt-out cookie” (Gogle Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).

Google’s online product advertising for Buzz says: “The first thing we all do when we find something interesting is share it. More and more of this kind of sharing takes place online. Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos, and more. […] When you are out in the real world, you usually want to say something about where you are. Buzz makes this easy” (Google Buzz advertising, online at http://www.google.com/buzz, February 14, 2009). Sharing information with friends and to a certain extent with the public is surely an important feature of everyday communication that allows humans to stay in touch and to make new contacts. But Google only presents potential advantages of Buzz and does not say a single word about potential disadvantages. Do people really want to share vast amounts of private data and location data not only with their friends, but also with Google? Can Google be considered as a friend of all humans, or doesn’t it rather accumulate power that can also cause great harm to humans? Do people really always want to tell others where they currently are? Are people really interested in sharing their location data not only with selected friends, but also with Google? It is a natural corporate behaviour that Google only presents potential advantages of its applications in its marketing videos, ads, and events. But by doing so, it creates a one-dimensional picture of online reality that conveys the impression that we live in a world without power structures, in which all humans always benefit from corporate practices. But the great financial crisis has made clear to many citizens that corporations cannot always be trusted and are prone to act in ways that do not benefit all, but only a small group of investors.

Buzz is not the only example of Google-enhanced surveillance. Google has developed Goggles, which is an image-recognition software that identifies objects that people take pictures of by mapping these objects with Google’s image database and provides information about these objects. If this application were linked to image data about humans, it would allow people to identify and obtain information about humans, who they see on the street by taking a picture of them and linking this image to Google in real time. This would on the one hand allow humans to intrude the privacy of others in public spaces by identifying their personality and it would allow Google to gather, assess, provide, and potentially sell real time data about the physical location of millions of people.

Why is data surveillance for economic surveillance by Google applications such as Buzz problematic? One could argue that Google provides a free service to users and that in return it should be allowed to access, store, analyze, and use personal data and Internet usage behaviour. But the problem is that the power relations between Google and its users are not symmetric. In December 2008, Google controlled 57% of the online advertising market (http://www.attributor.com/blog/google-ad-server-share-now-at-57-microhoo-less-than-15-market-share, accessed on February 15, 2010). A Google monopoly in online advertising poses several threats (for a general account of the threats of information monopolies see Fuchs 2008, 164-171):

* Ideological power threat: Online advertising presents certain realities as important to users and leaves out those realities that are non-corporate in character or that are produced by actors that do not have enough capital in order to purchase online advertisements. An online advertising monopoly therefore advances one-dimensional views of reality.

* Political power threat: In modern society, money is a form of influence on political power. The concentration of online advertising therefore gives Google huge political power.

* Control of labour standards and prices: An online advertising monopoly holds the power to set industry-wide labour standards and prices. This can pose disadvantages for workers and consumers.

* Economic centralization threat: An economic monopoly controls large market shares and thereby deprives other actors of economic opportunities.

* Surveillance threat: Targeted online advertising is based on the collection of vast amounts of personal user data and usage behaviour that is stored, analyzed, and passed on to advertising customers. Modern societies are stratified, which means that certain groups and individuals compete with others for the control of resources, consider others as their opponents, benefit from certain circumstances at the expense of others, etc. Therefore information about personal preferences and individual behaviour can cause harm to individuals if it gets into the hand of their opponents or others who might have an interest in harming them. Large-scale data gathering and surveillance in a society that is based on the principle of competition poses certain threats to the well-being of all citizens. Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others. If such collections are owned privately, then access to data might be sold because there is an economic interest in accumulating money. Humans who live in modern societies have an inherent interest in controlling which personal data about them is stored and is available to whom because they are facing systemic threats of being harmed by others. Large collections of personal information pose under the given modern circumstances the threat that humans can be harmed because their foes, opponents, or rivals in private or professional life can potentially gain access to such data. Since 9/11, there has been an extension and intensification of state surveillance that is based on the argument that security from terrorism is more important than privacy. But state surveillance is prone to failure, and the access of state institutions to large online collections about citizens (as for example enabled by the USA PATRIOT Act) not only poses the possibility for detecting terrorists, but also the threat that a large number of citizens is considered as potential criminals or terrorists without having committed any crimes and the threat that the state obtains a huge amount of information about the private lives of citizens that the latter consider worth protecting (as for example: political views, voting decisions, sexual preferences and relationships, friendship statuses).

Overall, the introduction of Google Buzz shows that there is an antagonism of privacy protection and economic surveillance interests on the contemporary Internet that is dominated by commercial interests. It might be time for thinking more about strengthening alternative Internet platforms and the potentials for constructing an alternative Internet.

Christian Fuchs (http://fuchs.uti.at)

Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and society: social theory in the information age. New York: Routledge.

The New York Times ran an article about this new technology on February, 13, 2010:
Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service

I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users to Google Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists and that they label such endeavours totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google’s expanding services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.

Surveillance and Big Brother are not only somewhere out there in China or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself – in the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.

The Buzz privacy policy for example says:
“When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services”
“If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google.”

The task for Google is to collect as much data about users as possible and to then sell this data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).

Google uses DoubleClick for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other Web platforms (see Google Privacy Policy). There is only an opt-out option from this surveillance. Opt-out options are always unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Of course Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because this would drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising.

To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic surveillance, is a form of Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.

GOOGLE BUZZ PRIVACY POLICY
9 February 2010