The GDPR, still in its infancy and still to prove its long-term efficiency, succeeded in setting a global regulatory standard that pressured consistent followership from other countries around the world. In the US, where Silicon Valley exercises a major economic influence and acts as an important consultative pillar for this type of legislative decision, a federal law with a scope similar to that of the GDPR is yet to be designed and enforced. In the meantime, there have been various signals that such a regulatory initiative is long overdue. Facebook has received a fine of US$5 billion, the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for breaches of consumer privacy, and 20 times greater than any similar penalty ever imposed worldwide (Federal Trade Commission 2019). In a May 2019 op-ed in The New York Times, Chris Hughes – one of Facebook’s initial five co-founders – openly advocated for the breakup of Facebook and sustained regulatory reform:
For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive.
(Hughes 2019)
Hughes refers to Facebook’s successive moves towards insulating itself from competition: in 2012, it acquired Instagram and, in 2014, WhatsApp. Hughes’s argument is based on the claim that the resulting colossus is both too powerful and too dangerous. Breaking it up would ensure healthy competition, while regulating it would prevent further abuses of power. What is noteworthy to mention is that Facebook’s response to Hughes’s plea, although expectedly not in favor of dismantling the company, acknowledges the long overdue need for tight regulation:
We are in the unusual position of asking for more regulation, not less. … Anyone worried about the challenges we face in an online world should look at getting the rules of the internet right.
(Clegg 2019)
It is difficult to predict what a comprehensive legal framework covering all aspects of the online environment – personal, social, and commercial – would look like, or the effects of implementing unifying regulation at a global scale to companies and individuals. From a broader perspective, there is no precedent validated by history to guide lawmakers in approaching such a gargantuan task. The turmoil surrounding the repetitive offences of Facebook and those of other platforms points to the deficiency of existing laws and, at the same time, reveals a system that has been operating in retrospect. For too long, the online environment had been regulating itself. Only when flagrant consequences transpired did boundaries begin to be erected one by one. Yet, continuing to design and enforce legislation for the online environment is not a straightforward task. Going back to the goal of the “Onlife Initiative,” we must be ready to update our conceptual framework in order to be able to understand and address the never-ending challenges related to our digitization as a global society.
I have digressed: this is not a book about the trajectory of Facebook or social media, nor is it a book about regulation in the online environment, although both are crucial aspects that define where we are and help set the scene for the discussion proposed here. This is a book about each and every individual that is incessantly connected to this new social reality made possible through digital technologies of connectivity. In the face of the immense and still unchartered landscape that is the online environment, the importance and perspective of the single individual can be easily overlooked. Yet the individual is the most significant unit of a new value system; in that quality they need thorough consideration and protection, sometimes from their very own actions.
Every society in the world has the mission to equip its young with the tools to navigate social life and thus become social individuals, part of the larger community. From a very early age we are taught the norms, values, and customs of our society. We learn from our parents, educators, and role models what is good and what is bad, what is socially acceptable and what is not. We are shown how do behave in certain social circumstances and what are the consequences if we do not conform. This lengthy process that can last a lifetime is called socialization. While socialization comes with numerous dos and don’ts for conventional living, it does not yet include an online package. Much as the legal system, the social system has been caught off guard by the speed and the spread of the online engagement of its members. How exactly do we socialize the young for an environment that is more familiar to them than to the older members of society, the very ones that are supposed to be in charge of socialization? From this perspective, we could say that socialization has been going through a process of reversal. It is the young who have often socialized the older members of society to be equipped to take part in the digital world, an idea David Altheide introduced as early as 1995 (Altheide 1995). But this happens mostly at a technical level and escapes the problematic territory of values and norms. The reality is that the young have received no social training to help them navigate onlife. The approach of parents has mostly been one of uncritical adoption of digital technology. One of the well-being specialists I have interviewed insightfully remarks:
Unfortunately, parents are losing their ability to parent because their automatic response is to give [their children] a phone, an iPad and to say watch this, play this.
(Mark Wentworth)
Schools around the world have, in their turn, only more recently begun to introduce digital literacy classes and the effects of these programs are difficult to evaluate at this point.
Considering this context, defining who we are and who we should be in the online environment has been mostly left to the commercial entities that operate the Internet economy. While we have been under the illusion that we can decide what to share about ourselves and who to share it with, we have been unknowingly and collectively led to share more and more personal information by an increasingly compelling online experience. This addictive loop can represent a development threat to the younger members of society. A quote from a 17-year-old included in a 2017 report on digital childhood by the UK’s 5 Rights Foundation1 is revealing for the exposed position of children and teens and points to the importance of formal online socialization:
There should be some sort of education in the general education system not only about all the sort of cyberbullying and stuff, but just generally about how the internet and companies on the internet work … and they’re not necessarily doing everything in your favour. Yes, it is great – the internet is amazingly useful, but you have to sort of know how to behave, not just about towards other people but how much data you should be giving out and what’s realistically going to be happening to it.
(Kindron and Rudkin 2017)
The commercial system of the Internet has perpetuated a tacit exchange that is by now widely acknowledged. It has granted users free access in return for their personal data. Asked, during his Congress interrogation, how his company is able to sustain a business model in which users do not pay for service, Mark Zuckerberg bemusedly replied: “Senator, we run ads!” In the book Paid Attention, author Faris Yakob appeals to a much-used phrase that is descriptive of this deal: “If you are not paying for an online service, then you are the product being sold” (2015, p. 59). While the reality of the online economy is more complex than this logic implies, it does revolve around the commodification of identity online, understood as its transformation into a valuable resource. The volume of information that people share intentionally or unintentionally about themselves every second means that entire life narratives can be reconstructed from various types of available data. The intention is not to simply connect this online data to a living, breathing individual in order to identify them. What is more important is to understand who that individual is, based on their online behavior patterns – including likes, dislikes, interests, groups, causes, or shopping and consumption habits – in order to build a reliable profile. Profiling allows for individuals to be classified into targetable values and lifestyle categories. Advertisers and other entities rely on the accuracy of these categories for their persuasive interests. Yet to say that commercial entities are the only ones to profit from the commodification of online identities would make a false claim. For the individuals themselves, online identity can be a driver