We don't control our information

Ever had something go missing from the internet? Whether it’s a Facebook event or a photo on Flickr, we usually don’t have any control over our data online. Most of us take this for granted – but when 4000 of Bill Barrol’s tweets mysteriously vanished, he wanted compensation. Working on the premise that he is normally paid around $1 per word, he worked out that his tweets were valued at around $62,000, and demanded that Twitter cough up the money. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t pay out – his tweets were restored a few days later, and I don’t think he would have been getting a penny anyway!

Despite not actually receiving a payout, Bill’s quest for damages over his lost data illustrates bigger issues about control and the internet. In the past, people’s data would almost always be stored on their own computer, meaning they were responsible for keeping it safe and making sure no-one was able to illicitly access it. However, as high-speed internet connections have become more and more common, this has changed dramatically. Most people use webmail, in which email is stored on a web server rather than on the user’s hard drive. Websites such as Google Docs means documents are now frequently stored and edited online. More and more of our information is being stored in the cloud. This means that we leave responsibility for it being accessible, and secure, in the hands of private companies.

The biggest example of how this can be a problem Facebook – millions of people (me included!) will happily tell the website our name, age, job, interests, who our friends are, what events we’re going to be at, and rely on it as one of our main methods of communication. Advertisers love this, and pay facebook millions of pounds to target ads based on all of these details. Ever noticed how the adverts o your page seem to sometimes correspond creepily to your interests? That’s because Facebook has been flogging off what it thinks you like to whatever company wants to pay for it! As useful as services like Facebook can be, we should take into account how much we want these companies, other people or Facebook itself, to know about us, given their less than perfect record on privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg - The face of evil

As political activists, control over the internet poses even bigger issues than personal privacy. More and more, social networks are being used to organise large-scale protests and demonstrations. The UKUncut actions against Vodafone and Topshop, which SSY has taken part in, were originally organised through Twitter, and recent national student days of action have been called using Facebook events. There’s no question that this has been a huge boost in some respects – large events can be called with far less work than was required in the pre-internet era, and it gives a way for people who aren’t normally involved in radical politics to easily find out about, and take part in, political activity. However, there are also serious problems with this. If an event is organised only through Facebook, and Facebook decides to delete the event, what happens then? Just after the election, a Facebook event for a “Party Against The Tories” in George Square in Glasgow, which had hundreds confirmed as attending, mysteriously vanished. Whether you put this down to sheer coincidence (unlikely) or a police intervention (more than possible) it highlights perfectly the problem with these new ways of organising.

So what’s the solution to this? Saying that we aren’t going to use social networks anymore isn’t an answer – they’re far to useful, and have become a huge part of many young people’s lives. We need open networks, in which we are in more control. There’s already been an attempt at building something like this with status.net – an open-source alternative to Twitter. Anyone can set up their own status.net server, and users on any server can subscribe to any user on another. Another project, Diaspora, is aiming to build a similar alternative to Facebook. Although these don’t represent perfect solutions – not everyone has the resources or the know-how to run their own server – it’s a big improvement over the situation in which one company controls everything.

The internet is often praised as a great tool of democracy, and this is true – whether it’s governments being held to account over information from wikileaks, mass protests organised over twitter, or even websites like this, it has let us share information in ways which were never possible before, and the world is a better place for it. But we shouldn’t forget the fact that a lot of the internet is controlled by large corporations whose interests lie in money-making before user privacy, and that it doesn’t take much for a government to get a facebook event removed or a blog shut down. In the future we will hopefully see more open networks and ways of sharing information emerge, but until then, we need to be careful about how much we rely on websites that we can’t control.