Big Tech vs. your data & your democracy
As we move through daily life, we leave behind a trail of data: geolocation records, web browser history, and online interactions. When collected and analysed, this data can reveal an intimate picture of our lives: our fears, desires, needs, and political vulnerabilities. Australian privacy law is currently woefully under-equipped to protect Australians and our democracy from the threat of surveillance.
Without proper regulation to protect us, Big Tech corporations can weaponise this information against our democracy. They can manipulate voters, target vulnerable communities, suppress dissent, and hand enormous political power to private companies and political actors operating beyond public scrutiny.
The legacy of the Cambridge Analytica scandal
In 2014, Facebook prompted users to take a personality quiz. Unbeknownst to the 270,000 users who took the quiz and their 87 million Facebook friends, their psychological data was shunted straight into the hands of Cambridge Analytica – a political consulting company contracted by the 2016 Trump campaign. With the help of commercial data-brokers, Cambridge Analytica boasted 5,000 data points on 230 million American voters. It used that information to microtarget voters in swing states with pro-Trump content.
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” - Cambridge Analytics whistleblower
People assessed as anxious would be shown fear-based content about immigration or crime. Probable Trump supporters were encouraged to turn out to vote while Clinton voters could be targeted with voter-fraud allegations to discourage them from voting.
Two neighbours could receive completely different political messages without either knowing what the other had been shown. The individualisation of campaign promises makes it difficult to hold parties accountable when they fail to deliver. Journalists cannot scrutinise the messages and opponents cannot offer a rebuttal. The town square of democracy becomes a series of hushed closed-door conversations.
What Cambridge Analytica did was neither new nor unique. Surveillance capitalism had already perfected the practice of aggregating swathes of personal data to create detailed profiles of each person; using those profiles to influence their buying behaviour. Political digital advertisers such as Cambridge Analytica simply turned this well-oiled machine from consumers to voters.
While Cambridge Analytica failed to get a foothold in Australia, its strategies are now commonplace in Australian politics.
Surveillance and political persuasion
Labor’s voter database allocates constituents a “persuadability score” based on data collected in polling and robocalls. The results are then cross-referenced against demographic information such as income, age, and gender to produce statistical modelling that informs strategists if you should be targeted for political advertising.
In a statement to the ABC a Labor insider said,
“If they had a higher persuadability score you would find out what they are persuadable on … so health, education, defence … then you would tailor the messages to them, so it could be more calls from the MP … [or] bombard them with direct mail.”
The Liberal party had similar practices, using Koch-owned corporation i360 to collate voter profiles, augmented by social media data to push individualised messaging in swing seats. Later, fearing data breaches, the party dropped the i360 platform.
The political party exemption to the Privacy Act means that Australians have little visibility over what data political parties collect about us; how they profile us; what messages they target at us, or whether they’re exploiting our vulnerabilities.
Surveillance, policing, immigration enforcement and military targeting all apply the same underlying method of collecting and analysing everything; predicting our behaviour, and acting on the results. Personal data is no longer just used to influence what people buy or how they vote. It can be used to decide who is watched, stopped, searched, detained, or deported.
Palantir: combining data capture with anti-democratic principles
Palantir builds the infrastructure of mass data analysis. Its software can analyse vast datasets to build detailed profiles of individuals, mapping our social connections, movements, habits, appearance, and more. The technology sounds like a fascist superweapon: a system capable of identifying, tracking and targeting dissenters. So it’s not surprising that this is how it is used.
In the US, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) runs custom Palantir software to track immigrants. Palantir’s software provides ICE agents with a dataset of 20 million people which they can search for highly-specific characteristics such as “marks”, “tattoos”, “scars”, “hair colour”, “eye colour”, and “licence plate reader data”. This makes it easier for ICE agents to kidnap and deport people, including law-abiding civilians.
Palantir could put restrictions on how its technology is used to oppress civilian populations. Unfortunately, the company’s leaders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp are unlikely to do so.
Thiel is unabashed in his belief that democracy is a barrier to his definition of freedom, particularly the checks on centralised power. He believes that power is best concentrated in the hands of a small elite class, as opposed to democratically in the hands of the people. Thiel funds Curtis Yarvin, a writer who rejects democracy and defends slavery. He advocates that the world should revert to feudalism with a tech CEO as king.
Karp believes Palantir’s primary purpose is “defending the West”. In line with this, Karp openly promotes that the West has a superior way of living and organising itself. In a letter to shareholders, Karp celebrated Samuel Huntington’s belief that “the rise of the west was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.
Karp hopes that AI will displace highly-educated left-leaning female voters and increase the economic power of vocationally-trained men. This is consistent with Thiel’s opinion that giving women the right to vote was a mistake.
Palantir has its own self-interested agenda. On the 19th of April, Palantir published a manifesto calling for the rest of Silicon Valley to join Palantir as a military arm of the state. They opined ‘National service should be a universal duty’ and ‘[[some cultures] have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful](https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312)’ - useful opinions for a corporation profiting from military information and the deportation of people from “some cultures”.
Palantir is a threat to Australian democracy
The anti-democratic and indefensibly-racist ideology of Palantir, has not stopped the Australian government from handing Palantir nearly $60 million of our money in combined state and federal contracts. They have also made a $100 million investment via our sovereign wealth fund.
We cannot tolerate a state where a private company both controls critical government infrastructure and pursues its own anti-democratic political agenda. The Australian Government needs to cancel existing contracts with Palantir, as has been already done in Spain, Switzerland, and soon the UK.
For the sake of our democracy, we cannot allow Palantir to gain a foothold in the Australian state.