Have you ever stopped to wonder how we got here?
When I first started using the internet before the year 2000, it was a new and exciting frontier. The thought of how it all worked and what the business models were didn’t cross my mind. It was just… there.
In the years that followed, a wave of new services appeared, and most of them were free. Free email, free photo storage, free social networks, free search engines. The question started to bubble up: “How do they make money?”
The common answer was advertising. We learned that our data was being collected, sold, and used to create detailed user profiles. Our privacy was the price for these “free” services. Yet, for the most part, we accepted it. The convenience of free software seemed to outweigh the potential consequences.
But what if there was another, much larger reason for this massive data collection?
The concept of Artificial Intelligence isn’t new. The companies working on AI knew they would need vast amounts of data to train their models. While it may not have been the initial reason for data collection back in the 1990s, the data gathered for advertising and user profiling became the perfect fuel for the AI revolution. The 2000s and 2010s saw this process accelerate dramatically. The conversation was about ads and profiling, but all the while, the data was also being used to train the AI that is now a part of our daily lives.
This leads to some uncomfortable questions about the internet we’ve built.
Everything we do online is stored somewhere. Our cloud storage, browsing history, private conversations, contacts, photos, purchases, locations, and every question we ask an assistant. These companies may know you better than your own family, yet you know almost nothing about them.
Did you agree to this? Are you okay with it? Do you know where your data is, how it’s being used, or how to get it deleted? Can you access the data of those who have access to yours?
On the other hand, would we have the incredible progress we see today without this data? This technology helps us in our daily lives, accelerates science and medicine, and makes our world more efficient. It’s not a simple black-and-white issue.
Is there still a chance to build a more private internet? Or is this the trade-off we have to live with? Was there a better way?