By Sheila Dean

Privacy, according to results favoring personal self-interest, is surging in the political field. Infringement has resulted in so many civil lawsuits and antitrust manifests companies have arrived at the “bargaining” phase of the grief process. Landmark court wins and key civil precedents favoring the consumer’s reasonable right to privacy is also being bridged to key original American legal foundry. This supports an individual’s self ownership and reasonable right to privacy.

While these progresses are in good legal form, what passes as Tech governance has not gotten the memorandum to make changes from the top.

Here is the snapshot of what I am seeing today as Big Tech, the self-erected Governor of Personal Data, deviates from both ethics and law from principled American legal guidance.

·         Big Tech’s current and former C-Levels saying that personal data is owned by the platform vs. the user generator whose license agreement [EULA] is based on one-click consent.

20+ years of consent based EULA’s establish the Users ownership license of any data or content they generate. If they don’t get a consent license, they don’t have any entitlement to market anyone’s personal data.  These statements are borne from relationships they have with data brokers, not from User Consumer serfs they are farming as parasites.

 ·         Arrogant and entitled young software and engineering developers trot out software built for government use on US citizens, migrating private collections of information, against 4th Amendment rights.

You’ve seen it before: engineers and corporate C-Levels who have been fluffed by apparent US government contracting legal fixers to tell them exactly how safe, insulated and protected they are from US consumer protection law enforcement. Sorry, guys. Tyranny is over. Immunity has been revoked.  Privacy law enforcement wheels are working without the chokepoints now that the SCOTUS has sided with consumers.  Some of these AI devs (Clearview AI) are so young they don’t remember what American privacy law enforcement was before “Get It All” public policy.  It’s time to get them an education. They were hired to violate and sell Pii, not classify it for TPRM and to make the government comply with legal orders, like they should be.

·         Marketing departments screening Privacy Compliance applicants, instead of the hire and reporting lines going directly to either HR or the company’s legal departments.

This is a governance practice plaguing the technology field industry-wide, particularly in Seattle.  The people who put data brokerage ahead of law, screen new hires and cause them to report to marketing for LEGAL COMPLIANCE.  This is why Big Tech is underneath so many civil lawsuits. Marketing does not perform to legal conformance, they perform toward sales. They do not care about what’s fair for the consumer. The legal department is dispatched to produce privacy contract work and then chases them, as legal temps, right out of the building.

·         H1BV hires are so preferential to India and other Asian countries that ethics policy development and blogs repost their hopes to triangulate ethics compliance in the United States directly to APAC media outlets vs. national US ethics, law and compliance blogs.

If Asian immigrants in the US, here on work Visas, are performing US technical policy development, one has really got to ask: where are the lawyers primed on US law, American common law and privacy values?  Furthermore, are they just not hiring enough US citizens for their ethics and law pools?  If so, why?  One theory worth exploring is bias to anticipating Asian governance at the top, particularly Indian Asian hires. It appears non-US citizens have instituted their own marketing values and institutional priorities at the top of the proverbial pyramid.

Hires from mainland United States have more personal and institutional rights against discrimination and other forms of bias than immigrant hires.  Furthermore, there is substantial published evidence that India, China, Russia and Former Soviet Socialist countries are running far behind established American law and human rights practices on institutional equality and information security.  Why would they prioritize American information security and against inherent biases, if that’s not part of their training?  This is the picture of an insular echo chamber that has not yet admitted the legal relevance of US Consumer will.

To be fair, we are told every day by their PR departments that they “value inclusion and diversity” and that “privacy and security is of utmost importance”.  At some point, the words have to match the deeds.  The waterfall project hires are collating civil lawsuits instead of profits.  Evidently, the deeds are just not there to meet an American standard of literal legal compliance.

·         Data brokers stonewalling on user data price exchanges with the consumers; flatly refusing to disclose the exchange rates of data belonging to the consumer based on “proprietary” means.

If you, as a contracting party, cannot know the cost exchange rate of your own data, you’re locked out.  To sell or rent your property to a Data Broker without consulting you on price is an antitrust crime known as price fixing.  Since the scraping & cleaning class of tech marketing is part of this illegal trade exchange, they won’t escape the antitrust scourge, no matter how low down the totem pole they sit.

 ·         Advertising companies and nonprofits lobbying efforts are so well entrenched they introduce their own compliance manuals and sponsor their own think tank and research publication firms to best support continuity of advertising in the marketplace.

Data brokers have enjoyed a legally inhibited environment with no force of consumer protection behind it, until very recently.  Since the consumer has no relationship to data brokers and third party marketers, advertising leadership will need to go back to the whiteboard and stop trying to invent new law supporting an unqualified pry into the consumer.

 Google rented approximately 90% of known Free Market think tanks of K Street as public affairs frontmen to run counterpoint to Antirust. AdChoices, a nonprofit with close ties to the IAPP, is a subsidiary of a bigger nonprofit dedicated to promoting agendas of the Advertising industry.  Understanding just how far these companies have gone to protect their perceived entitlements to Users personal data is a good first step into reforming governance in the technology field.

·         Public-private police and Homeland Security contractors hide behind unlawful non-disclosure agreements for mass surveillance and to circumvent lawful objections to mass and individual data collections for government uses and compliance audits.

Over the years, these “search-and-avoid” missions to erect walls against the US national consumer, who has legal right of objection to collection, have collapsed with a little legal push back.  That sets more entrenched precedents.   It is better if DHS and related agencies hire a qualified legal compliance team to audit all of their information wastes and to minimize public liability to the spread of this information. If they are anything less than totally clean and their information security anything less than military grade, the US citizen is going to suffer underneath intelligence grabs by Russia, China, North Korea and private Intelligence firms who know vulnerabilities better.  That situation is off mission from “protecting the Homeland”.

While I have more specific recommendations for these companies to do better, I cannot say directly what they are, here, at time of press. 

I’m an American data owner. They have made it very clear, they don’t care what I have to contribute to their governance processes unless they can scrape it up from this blog for free. Their Facial Recognition software won’t recognize me from the training data. That doesn’t mean I don’t know my rights and influence the policy they are going to have to live with for years.