Big Tech’s Asymmetries with Big Brother
As a hostage and their kidnapper physically struggle, both desperately trying to pry away a loaded firearm from the other, a police sniper takes the shot. The entire world pauses while looking to their smart phones for an update on this ongoing hostage crisis, and then moves on just as quickly. This surreal climax of the Black Mirror episode “Smitherines” brilliantly sets the visceral stakes of the ongoing transactions between Big Tech and Big Brother. But as Professor Yan Fang uncovered, this arms-length partnership is not as seamless as Big Tech pessimists might believe. There are what she calls “knowledge misalignments” between these two institutions that complicate the picture of the next generation of law enforcement, investigations, and individual privacy rights.
In Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, Fang discusses the reality that tech companies have become evidence intermediaries. This is fictionally illustrated in “Smitherines,” where the kidnapping of a social media company’s employee leads to an unlikely partnership between the social media company and law enforcement as they both try to uncover as much information as possible about the kidnapper. One of eerie takeaways from this on-screen partnership is that the social media company is able to access and leverage far more information about the kidnapper from his social media profiles than police detectives with years of experience. This striking commentary illustrates the real-world truth that tech companies are custodians of petabytes of consumer information that billions of people around the world freely share on their platforms. Thus, Fang describes that when law enforcement agencies (LEAs) seek information about these consumers for a variety of investigatory purposes, tech companies serve as the intermediary between LEAs and the trove of evidence they seek. Continue reading "Big Tech’s Asymmetries with Big Brother"
