This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which defines the fundamental relationship between the American government and its people, endowing all men with the right to liberty. In 1776, this enumerated right served as the colonists’ proclamation of self-sovereignty against intrusive control by the British Parliament, including protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. However, our liberty remains vulnerable with the rise of surveillance capitalism, the practice of claiming human experiences as raw material for the profit of large corporations. Pivoting from the 18th century, liberty is now exploited by corporate, not government, acquisition of our identities and autonomy, through personal data collection and behavior modification. To protect the liberty that nourishes democracy, the government should pass laws that grant individuals greater authority over their data and regulate the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.
In the mid-1700s, James Otis, a Boston lawyer, argued that one of the most essential branches of liberty is the freedom of one’s house, and that a man’s house is “his castle.” He decried the “Writs of assistance” that empowered British officers to enter civilian houses to conduct arbitrary searches for alleged “uncustomed goods,” laying the foundation for the Fourth Amendment in 1791. This amendment declared that people’s houses, papers, and effects should not be subjected to unreasonable searches by government officials. Today, “our house” can also refer to the digital profile containing all the sensitive information closely tied to our identities. Yet, computerization has shifted our greatest threat to privacy to the quiet, corporate machinery processing the data we hand over voluntarily.
Born in the age of digital technology, I saw the internet as a place of democracy, where every individual’s voice may be heard equally and freely on platforms. But this architecture of openness masks an emerging predatory trend. Tracing back to the 19th century, commercial actors began seeking to exert greater control over customers to maximize revenue. This required both the aggregation of huge volumes of data and the intervention in our behavior by learning, as Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff notes, how to “tune, herd, and condition our behavior with subtle and subliminal cues.” An example of behavior intervention in recent legal action occurred in January: a teenager sued Meta and YouTube for psychological harm caused by features like infinite scroll and autoplay. Although Meta claims the parent clearly did not read the terms of service, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl ruled that the issue stemmed from the way the app was designed and not the content itself, while asserting that “platforms can’t liken warnings buried in terms of service to prominently displayed warnings.” This judicial recognition of companies’ hidden traps highlights the erosion of liberty, one that I experience every time I bypass the inconvenience of reading a lengthy digital contract just to stay connected to my peers.
The more that is known about us, the easier it is to control us. When I agree to vague terms of service, I unknowingly consent to the collection of data such as my precise locations from GPS, which can be used for the company to learn my interests, predict my behavior, and tailor content to keep me scrolling on their platform for longer. As someone who relies on social media to learn about global perspectives, I feel deprived of my liberty to make decisions because the platform’s underlying algorithms will “herd” me toward thoughts and beliefs that are profitable for companies. By influencing user behavior to make it more predictable, companies undermine the essence of autonomy. Data is extracted far beyond the requirements of the service; consequently, decisions are made with limited transparency and informed consent to how that data is utilized, creating social inequality.
Data collected from us is also refined by large computational factories and sold to a network of customers interested in what we’re doing now and in the future. The court case In re: Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation documents Facebook’s violations of consumer fraud and privacy laws in sharing user information with third parties without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, private-sector incentives are also increasingly aligned with government interests in tracking everyone’s behavior. Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency(NSA) employee, quotes “Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft…provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems we use to communicate.” These concerns directly echo our fears against government intrusion into our liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
University of Berkeley Professor Paul M. Schwartz warned, “the enormous amounts of personal data available in computers…render obsolete much of the previous legal protection.” To preserve our right to liberty, the government should pass future laws that include clear consent standards, limits on data retention, algorithmic transparency, and other stronger enforcement mechanisms. A notable decision by California’s Privacy Protection Agency was to launch the Delete Request and Opt-Out platform on January 1, enabling California residents to submit a request directing data brokers, who often obtain our data from companies, to delete personal information and to cease collecting and selling it. This act was a huge success, receiving 18,000 data deletion requests within the first 48 hours of its launch, far exceeding the agency's expectations. As we look toward the next 250 years of American democracy, I hope that this patchwork of state laws can transition into national regulatory frameworks so that every citizen’s data liberty rights are protected.
A democratic nation protects a citizen's desire to think and act freely under the rule of law. By keeping the operations of surveillance capitalism obscure from the public, corporations leave us with little capacity for true decision-making on the platforms they own. As University of Virginia Professor Maurer puts it, we should retain the right to “understand what data is being collected, how it is being used to generate revenue for these companies, and make an informed decision on whether to continue using those platforms,” because our privacy is not a commodity but a protected liberty under the founding doctrine of America.