$500 Million dollars. While such a sum would be almost inconceivable to students living on a diet of ramen and popcorn, it represents the fine charged to search engine giant Google in a recent court settlement after Google allowed advertisements to run on it’s site for an illegal prescription drug pharmacy. This suit, if played out as expected, will represent the largest fine of its kind in history, and represents a reigniting of the debate over who truly holds power and authority in a digital age, and to what degree this authority can be exercised.
Launched in 2011, The Silk Road served as the internet’s largest supplier of drugs and illegal substances, operating as a marketplace where sellers could exchange products with consumers via digital currency called “bitcoins” that carried actual monetary value offline. The site has been shut down several times in the past few years, yet continues to resurface as it is taken over by new anonymous administrators each time the current administrator is arrested.
The problem, it seems, lies in the inherent lawlessness of the digital world; without actual land and borders, how does one country exert jurisdiction over certain web content, especially in cases where the content would violate the laws of one country and not another?
Certainly, this article is not meant to suggest that no laws or regulations exist for web content; they certainly do, and most place the responsibility of the content on the admins. My question lies in the more existential idea of how one can “own” digital content, and to a greater extent, make rules and regulations for bits of intangible data. For example, Facebook. As much as I would like to believe what I publish to my page is personal, I have to accept that my use of Facebook’s site entitles the site administrators to ownership of my information.
On a day to day basis, this is an acceptable trade-off for staying in touch with family and friends, yet what happens when, say, an advertising company wants to target me for an ad campaign they are releasing? Is my preference for 80’s music and movies actually Facebook’s information to release to this third party? Legally, yes. And it’s disturbing.
The problem with a corporation’s ownership of personal information to this extent, despite it being the choice of the user to share it online, is the lack of governance over what corporations do with the information, especially with the rise of sites like The Silk Road and illegal drug pharmacies.
Currently, it is legal for search engines and retail sites to save the searches of customers in order to provide them with products or searches that resemble what they were searching for, slowly building a bank of information from which the sites can then predict what the user will want to search or buy. The problem is these banks of individual data then become sort of “off-shore accounts” of personal data which the user has little to no power to edit after the data is collected. This becomes legally problematic when one considers users who might search for sites like The Silk Road; even if they do not purchase illegal substances, their activity on the site is banked and can create a profile of a drug-user while no actual crime has been committed.
What’s more, users have no control over their banked information after it is gathered, and accordingly this information can be obtained through the site’s owners without the user’s knowledge. While we’d all surely like to believe our information is protected by laws regarding what can be stored, shared, and for what purposes, the truth is the information banks are intangible, and therefor nearly impossible to be truly protected by the law.
