Abstract
The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly, people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes the legitimacy to act on the public. Business ethics and private law are not designed to answer these questions, which are primarily political. If people have lost the right to disengage with commercial technologies, we may need to hold the companies that offer them to the same standards to which we hold the public sector. This paper first defines the problem and demonstrates that it is significant and widespread, and then argues for the development of an overarching normative framework for what constitutes non-domination with regard to digital technologies. Such a framework must involve a nuanced idea of political power and accountability that can respond not only to the legality of corporate behaviour, but to its legitimacy.
Highlights
The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly, people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms
With the rise of the platform and mobile data economies, states worldwide have increasingly come to rely on private-sector data to ‘see’ their populations (Scott 1998), and as a result, the private sector is systematically taking on tasks that have traditionally been the preserve of the state
2.2 Defining What Is Public Technology. Even where they have widespread negative effects on political, social or economic life, firms tend to be judged according to different standards from government. This is because firms ‘do not function according to a democratic logic to offset inequalities or to defend certain rights’ (Elsig and Amalric 2008) unless they are explicitly forced by government to do so, and because regulation of the private sector is not designed with public scrutiny in mind
Summary
Datafication poses serious challenges to the way people conceptualise rights and freedoms around the world. Foley and Swilling note ‘the risks which come with the outsourcing of services to the private sector [...] – where a private company attempts to hold the country’s most vulnerable people hostage and leaving the government with no option but to concede to its demands.’ This is an example of technology-based power that aligns with the three characteristics of domination according to Lovett (2010): imbalance of power, dependency and arbitrariness. This type of activity by firms demonstrates problems of power, dependence and arbitrariness: firms have the ability to act arbitrarily on the mass scale themselves, but create markets for data and profiles that enable others to act arbitrarily as well, without scrutiny or accountability This second type takes the form of passive intervention resulting from the design of products and platforms, as for instance when social media algorithms amplify particular political messages over others in a systematic way, or change the reach and power of misinformation about public health issues (e.g. Guardian 2019c). This paper aims at two objectives: more closely defining the problem of legitimacy in relation to the technology sector, and exploring the potential of a non-domination lens as a way to interrogate the legitimacy of corporate technological intervention
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