Billion-dollar tech companies “steal your dreams and sell them”

Freedom to Think is a story about trillion-dollar tech companies, their algorithms, and categorises us and jumps to troubling conclusions about who we are. Their intrusion further into our lives also shapes our everyday thoughts choices and actions – from who we date to whether we vote to our sexual orientation with facial recognition technology claiming to spot people  “predisposed “ to commit crimes with the growing use of psychometric testing in recruitment and much more. Thoughts of how we can fight back. “

The most tyrannical government is powerless to control the inner workings of the mind” the US Supreme Court declared in 1942. Many might try to censor what we say, no one can control what we think.

Vladimir Putin thinks that if he can control what Russian citizens see and hear, he can influence what they think.

Susie Alegre, a prolific international human rights lawyer, charts chequered history from witchcraft trials and the Mad Men who made billions for the tobacco industry, to religious zealots who manipulated superstition, fear, and faith as tools of social control and argues recent development in technology provide terrifying new ways for corporations and governments to access, alter and manipulate our thoughts.

 

Offering up everything from Alexa and other “Virtual assistants” in children’s bedrooms to the abuses of China’s social credit system.  Alegre says our freedom to think enshrined more than 70 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – is under assault like never before.

The metadata we blithely feed to large, unaccountable tech firms as we scroll, shop, chat and share online “ bares our souls” exposing us to manipulation on an unprecedented scale. Alegre’s daughter is banned from having an Alexa because “ it steals your dreams and sells them.

Alegre woke up after Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum to discover the world was different from her Facebook feed and says “ Had I been lulled into a false sense of security so that I would not see the need to speak up?”.

Facial recognition can still do a lot of harm it is inaccurate, incorrectly identifying someone as LGBTQ in countries with anti-gay laws can have grave consequences. Police using AI to predict whether someone might be a criminal is a violation of the absolute right not to be penalised for your thoughts, or inferences about your thoughts alone says, Alegre.

Alegre also focuses on the abuses enabled by Meta, Google, and others, She didn’t have the chance to engage with how these firms being labelled “extremist” in Russia is fast changing the ground under our feet.

Many of Alegre’s answers are those digital rights campaigners have been advocating for years, bans on surveillance advertising, tough regulations on emotion recognition technology accountability for platforms that allow violence and hate speech to spread unchecked.  How far the authoritarians will go to control and suppress their populations. The EU  is a leader in its efforts to protect privacy and rights online, with groundbreaking legislation like the General Data Protection  Regulation, the upcoming Digital Service Act, and the Digital Markets Act. We should do something similar in the future.

Freedom to Think: Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds By Susie Alegre, Atlantic Books, £20, 400 pages.