Inner sanctum

It used to be quite easy to disappear. In 1859, an 18-year-old Welsh boy called John Rowlands vanished from his hometown. Nine years later he showed up again as American journalist and explorer Henry Morton StanleyA Welsh-American who explored Central America. .

But today, people wanting to start a new life have to deal with a new obstacle: social media. That is what journalist Esther Beadle discovered when she decided to leave it all behind in 2016. Within hours of her disappearance, her picture had been plastered all over the internet, as friends and well-meaning strangers tried to track her down and bring her back.

And even if someone does slip through the net, they will never be able to disappear entirely, because we are constantly being tracked by our phones and other devices. The average person in the USA has their location exposed 747 times a day; in the EU, 376 times.¹

That is why one academic wants to see Big Tech driven from our lives. HarvardA top US university, founded in 1636. professor Shoshana Zuboff says we have lost one of our most fundamental rights: the right to privacy.

Her warning is timely. Criticisms are mounting of digital giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the last year these companies have collectively sacked 330,000 employees, often with little fanfare or even warning.² Last week, many Google workers only found out they had lost their jobs when they discovered they could not log into work systems any more. Some did not even receive an email explaining the decision.

The negative publicity has put new scrutiny on the practices of tech companies. And that is why some experts have become quietly optimistic about our ability to regulate them. 

In the USA, Joe Biden's administration has stopped Microsoft and Meta from buying up other companies, bringing their expansion to a halt. And the EU has gone further still. It recently slapped a $4.1bn (£3.3bn) fine on Google's parent company Alphabet for trying to stifle competition.

At the same time, the EU, US and UK are all beefing up their laws to regulate what tech companies can and cannot do with their customers' data.

But Zuboff thinks this only goes so far. What really matters, she argues, is who has control of data.

No matter what privacy guarantees the tech companies offer, she says, they still ultimately own our data. That means they can renegeGo back. on their promises at any time.

Worse still, we, and the regulators, probably will not even realise they have done it. The companies guard their secrets fiercely, so the outside world still has very little understanding of how their technology works.

The only answer, she believes, is to bring Big Tech under democratic oversight. That way, we have control.

She thinks we should start with a so-called "right to sanctuary". In older times, a person could claim sanctuary in a church to avoid persecution by authority. In the modern day, it would allow us to demand that Big Tech stop collecting data from our homes and other private, cherished spaces.

Yes: People need the ability to be alone, to go unnoticed, even to leave it all behind if they want to. Big Tech's constant tracking and monitoring is an affront to our privacy. 

No: Big Tech uses the data it collects to make our lives better: to improve the services we use and recommend things we might like. That is a much more tangible benefit than privacy.

Or... What the tech companies are doing is wrong, but we cannot stop them by invoking some ancient law. We need to turn them from private companies into public services, where we as citizens have control.