Are Universities fuelling Surveillance Capitalism?
Richard Owen, Department of Management
Are Universities fuelling Surveillance Capitalism? Before we get to that, let’s start with a film: well actually a film documentary released this summer. The Great Hack is a film about Cambridge Analytica (CA). It follows David Carroll, an academic trying to get his voter profile data back from the company and Brittany Kaiser, former business development manager for the SCL Group - the parent company of Cambridge Analytica - and whistle blower. The film is brave, candid, informative and beautifully made. As you might expect, it features many who played a prominent role in the story, including journalist Carole Cadwalladr, CA founder Steve Bannon, Alexander Nix (former CEO and Director of SCL), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and of course Chris Wylie, former SCL contractor and whistle blower. But as I finished watching the film, I realised that someone was largely missing, having only the briefest of mentions. To be precise, some people and a University.
Chris Wylie worked with Aleksandr Kogan, lecturer and senior research associate at the Department of Psychology at Cambridge University. Kogan also published under the name Dr Spectre. It was Kogan who developed the 'This Is My Digital Life’ App that was used by Cambridge Analytica to scrape personal data from 87 million Facebook users without their consent, which in turn - it is alleged - was used to support psychographic microtargeting of Facebook ads to ‘persuadables’ in swing states in the 2016 U.S. election, and - it is again alleged – in the U.K. as part of the Leave.eu campaign. Kogan did this through a company he founded with Joseph Chancellor, a post doc at Cambridge University, called Global Scientific Research (GSR): SCL was one of GSR’s clients. Chancellor went on to work for Facebook. Cambridge University gained assurances from Kogan that none of the data collected for his academic research was used in his external work at GSR[1]. Kogan was however at least in part inspired by the work of his colleagues at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, including the myPersonality Facebook App and associated database originally developed there by David Stillwell in 2007[2]. Stillwell is the Centre’s Academic Director and lecturer at Cambridge’s Judge Business School in Big Data analytics and quantitative social science. His profile at the University states he has published papers ‘using social media data from millions of consenting individuals to show that the computer can predict a user's personality as accurately as their spouse can’ and that he also does external consultancy for a number of large multinational companies.
I am not going to dwell on the illegalities of what happened with the Facebook data. I think we would all agree the need for obtaining informed consent from users to use their data for specific purposes, even if we could debate whether this consent is meaningful and truly informed (see some papers by Catherine Flick on the limits of informed consent in the context of big data if you are interested)[3]. These are important issues, but my question is a different one. Consider how Cambridge University responded to the side swipe made by Mark Zuckerberg at his April 2018 Congressional hearing when he said ‘.. there’s a whole program associated with Cambridge University where a number of researchers - not just Aleksandr Kogan, although to our current knowledge he’s the only one who sold the data to Cambridge Analytica -….are building similar apps….So we do need to understand whether there is something bad going on at Cambridge University...’.
This is how the University replied: ‘’We would be surprised if Mr Zuckerberg was only now aware of research at the University of Cambridge looking at what an individual’s Facebook data says about them…our researchers have been publishing such research since 2013 in major peer-reviewed scientific journals... These have included one study led by Dr Aleksandr Spectre (Kogan) and co-authored by two Facebook employees’’. Now all this research, and research going back to the establishment of the Psychometric Centre in 2005, is I presume quite legal and underpinned by informed consent and other ethical principles. But as I say, this is not my question. What I want to know is how much of this (legal and ethically approved) research is, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly, fuelling surveillance capitalism?
Shoshana Zuboff’s essay on surveillance capitalism[4] is elegant, disturbing and important. It’s also very long: I can recommend a concise and articulate (if at times a little gushing) keynote video that sums up some of the key arguments.[5] Zuboff tells the story of how companies like Google and Facebook learned at the turn of this millennium to use their platforms to expropriate online behaviour and the sharing of private human experiences as free raw capital for digital supply chains, translating ‘behavioural surplus’ into insights with commercially-valuable, predictive capability. She shed light on the emergence of a new era characterised by constant surveillance, continuous tracking and analysis of our online activity to profile, predict and nudge for not only commercial but political ends. As Langdon Winner noted several decades ago, artefacts have politics[6]. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism has spread like an invasive species with no natural predators, feeding on our need as social beings to connect and share and our insatiable curiosity to search and know. She argues that by hiding nothing, we risk becoming nothing. She hopes that by ‘naming we tame’. I agree, but I suggest that naming needs to go further. Somewhere far from Silicon Valley and closer to home.
Universities, it has been argued, have three missions. First to teach, second to foster research and enquiry and third to address society’s economic and social challenges. This last mission can take many forms: the narrative of impact from research, the narrative of greater public accountability, the narrative of the Civic University and the narrative of the skilled and industry-ready graduate. And of course, the narrative of innovation, driven by significant funding attached to such policy instruments as the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy, which often privilege a triple helix model of government - university - industry interactions. In this world which universities now inhabit my question is a simple one: how much of what we are doing is fuelling surveillance capitalism – directly or indirectly? What is going on in the plethora of digital institutes, hubs and corridors popping up in and around Universities in the U.K. and all over the world? In our computer departments, psychology departments, maths departments, centres for doctoral training, marketing groups and management schools?[7]. In all those external consultancy activities and industry secondments academics increasingly engage with alongside their university day jobs. I for one would like to know. For me this is an issue as much about reflexivity as it is about ethics.
It was Hannah Arendt who once said ‘’the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil’’. Is surveillance capitalism evil? I guess history will be the judge. But we surely can’t deny its emerging and potentially profound impact: on our society, politics, behaviour, on the human condition and our collective future. How much of that is a result of what we are researching (and teaching) I do not know. But I think we should find out.
[1] www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-from-the-university-of-cambridge-about-dr-aleksandr-kogan
[2] www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/productsservices/mypersonality
[3] Flick, C. (2016). Informed consent and the Facebook emotional manipulation study. Research Ethics, 12(1), 14–28.
[4] Shoshana Zuboff ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power’.Profile Books 691pp.
[5] www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeaSxCN2uw8
[6] Daedalus Vol. 109, pp. 121-136
[7] www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/advertising-academia-controlling-thoughts-universities