Why is digitalization dangerous for society?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Technological progress today ceases to serve the interests of society, becoming an increasingly less controlled instrument of enrichment for the largest corporations. Moreover, it turns into an ideal means of controlling the population. Experts and representatives of the business community spoke about this yesterday at the round table "Digital transformation: new challenges and new opportunities for society" in the Public Chamber.

The event was originally announced under the title Digital Slavery or Digital Freedom? How to overcome electronic addiction? " However, the leadership of the OPRF, obviously, decided not to emphasize so “radically” and softened the agenda. However, despite the absence of obvious patriots and conservatives at the event, it turned out to be interesting. Almost all the dangerous aspects of digitalization and internetization, covered by Katyusha, were voiced yesterday by quite respectable citizens in suits, and not by some "marginalized with a cabbage in a beard."

In his opening remarks, Vyacheslav Laschevsky, moderator and first deputy chairman of the OP's Commission for the Development of the Information Community, Media and Mass Communications, noted that, according to Kaspersky Lab, 40% of Russian children under the age of 10 are almost constantly online. And this environment is not safe, for which there is a lot of evidence today. The new generation has problems with social communications, building normal relations in society. And all this - against the background of the convenience of using various digital services.

The first speaker, the executive director of the Healthcare department of Ipsos, Marina Bezuglova, practically word for word repeated the report of Dr. Kurpatov at the Sberbank business breakfast in Davos. She noted that regulation of the use of digital devices is necessary, at least for vulnerable groups of the population.

“In the USSR, for example, there was a huge number of sanitary norms and rules, everything was clearly regulated. To what extent is the impact of digital devices on people currently being studied? Right now the "electronic school" project is underway. How long can a child work with these gadgets? Has anyone investigated this at all or not? These questions are very important now. For the public agenda, issues of educational and regulatory activities are at the core,”asked Bezuglova.

Well, our publication has already clothed many of the listed questions in official statements, and today we can safely say (based on the official responses of the authorities, which we have repeatedly cited) that not a single serious study concerning digital hygiene in the same schools has been made public. There are only unsubstantiated statements by officials and employees of control bodies that such studies were allegedly carried out.

Meanwhile, Bezuglova pointed out that leading companies in Silicon Valley such as Apple and Google are already beginning to advise their customers-users not to surf the Internet all the time, but to limit the time in front of gadget screens - so that the epidemic of "digital autism", which Dr. Kurpatov was broadcasting about in Davos is our harsh reality.

The topic of the complete elimination of privacy in the electronic era was raised by Professor, Doctor of Economics, Head of ANO "Center for Protection of Investors and Investors" Artem Genkin.

“The question arises: where are the boundaries of society's access to the life of an individual? Where is the line of defense for our privacy? What does all this lead to? By the various social rating systems, they are very popular now. China is the main distributor today. All information about an individual falls into one "black box", the result for him is the emergence of a dynamically changing rating of trust in him, a rating of his reliability. And this rating itself has to do with whether an individual will gain access to any public goods. In China, social rating has become an element of government strategy. It has resulted in the maximum ease of life for those with a high level of public trust and the maximum difficulty for those with a low level. These are new principles of social stratification and inequality.

The Chinese have released an application that allows you to determine if you have communicated with an infected coronavirus in the last month. What does this mean? That every person's movements are constantly being monitored and that medical secrecy is not respected - information about sick citizens is available to everyone. This situation is unusual for our mentality.

There are plans to further link databases with any information about the activities of an individual, and the databases of supervisory agencies in China are merged with the databases of private corporations. A number of companies also maintain their own customer bases with their own personal rating (scoring), and they closely cooperate with the state - this is Mail.ru Group, MTS, Yandex, Sberbank, Genkin said.

The topic of the security of personal data and the huge scale of interference in private life was raised by the co-chairman of the OD Committee on the Protection of Personal Data, editor-in-chief of RIA Katyusha, Andrei Tsyganov, at the parliamentary hearings in the State Duma last summer. At the same time, the risks of uncontrolled use of technologies of total accounting and control, the problems of national security generated by them, were analyzed in detail. And now at the site of the OP we hear familiar theses - it is obvious that this is becoming a trend, they are beginning to talk about it all over the world.

“In Europe and America, the society is against the installation of a camera system for scanning faces, in every possible way in favor of regulation in this matter. At the same time, more than 200,000 cameras have already been installed in Moscow - we have the most modern system in the world, comparable only to the same Chinese. And at the same time, in our country, in principle, there is no public movement to discuss whether it is necessary or not, right or wrong, says the director for work with the public sector of Mail.ru.

In fact, there is a public asset, as evidenced by a full hall (about 1000 people) at the all-Russian conference "Forced digitization of the personality or human freedom" on April 20, 2019, which was attended by active citizens from dozens of regions of the country. As a result of the event, a serious resolution was drawn up for the authorities, almost all of the points of which, alas, have not yet been implemented.

Ruslan Novikov, General Director of Argumenty i Fakty, rightly noted that “combining all personal data about a person is beneficial to any business. Business, first of all, is ready to invest in it”. Naturally, business does not give a damn about the privacy and security of a person's personal data, for him it is just a valuable product from which you can get an excellent gesheft.

The next expert in the OP rightly noted that the topic of digital security is constantly raised in the Western media, and all "innovative" processes are subjected to harsh criticism there. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google top managers were recently in the European Commission and tried to lobby for a refusal to ban facial recognition technology, which EU officials want to endure at the request of the leaders of countries and the population.

“And we have solid German Gref, Olga Uskova - that is, dominated by technocrats. In our country, no one raises a critical agenda in relation to the figure. Everyone seemed to have surrendered to the mercy of transnational corporations. But what about the Constitution? The right to privacy, home? Why do technocrats only say what they want from every iron?

All the projects of the digital economy that we have mentioned here have consequences that no one has thought or talked about yet. For example, a digital profile of a citizen. We are now creating it in every way. The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications introduces its 19 parameters (personal data of citizens), the Central Bank offers its pilot project - 53 parameters that will be available to banks and digital companies. And the Central Bank says: and we are doing this profile in order to better know our client and more accurately set him interest on loans. What will eventually happen? The poor will suffer - the most vulnerable strata: disabled people, large families, pensioners. They have the highest risk of delinquency. The bankers will immediately set them a protective interest, they will not be able to take out loans - and social tension will arise. It is the long-term impact of digital projects that no one is tracking. And they will …

10 years ago, we launched the UEC project - a universal electronic card of a citizen of the Russian Federation. And there were people from among the believers who protested, did not want to associate themselves with these chips. And the ROC itself was not very explicit, but supported them. And where are these believers today? We do not hear or see them. But they do exist, and they will appear if the situation starts to wobble somehow,”the speaker noted.

In fact, the situation has long begun to shake, and the authorities prefer not to deal with the solution of the accumulated problems - on the contrary, they havetily generate and demand the adoption of more and more digital laws. Let's take the same forthcoming second reading of the PFZ "On the Unified Population Register", which the OUZS considers necessary to "wrap up" as soon as possible - and thousands of fellow citizens support the public activists (see the sample statement at the link).

The Public Chamber rightly noted that a systematic analysis of digital projects in their interaction is necessary, which is still lacking. Moreover, it is necessary to consider not only the social perspective, but also information security, import substitution … And not just, as we like, publish a list of companies (it was announced by the Minister of Finance Siluanov in December last year), which should have installed half of the software by the end of this year Russian production. How will Aeroflot replace this software if all its simulators run on imported software? It is imperative to carefully and systematically monitor the long-term consequences.

The speakers also remembered the scandalous 482-FZ on the collection of biometrics from the population, launched by the Central Bank together with other credit institutions and Rostelecom. They noted that “the project didn’t go well” - our citizens are in no hurry to take biometrics, first of all, for security reasons. And all because our legislation is configured this way: there is no punishment for those who have leaked personal data. And it was also decided to work on this.

At the end of the discourse, the moderator Laschevsky decided to smooth over the rough edges and slightly “come out in defense of new technologies,” but, to be honest, it turned out not very convincing.

“This is our reality. Technocrats are not victorious, but technological progress. This process is irreversible. We must accept it as it is, but we must not let everything take its course, we just need to assess the risks … We will just take note of everything, we will work with the Ministry of Education so that it can start researching schoolchildren. We'll ask questions, sharpen the topic - and that's good. But we need to move from extremes - and not deny, and not directly assert that this will make us happy. We will definitely continue this work … , - assured Laschevsky, and I really want all this not to remain at the level of words.

Many speakers spoke about the lack of criticism of digital processes in the media, which certainly does not apply to our publication. And behind this news bulletin of ours there are thousands of indignant citizens demanding to abolish the blind general digitization of the country and people. They actively unite on the platform of the Public Commissioner for the Protection of the Family, the Committee for the Protection of Personal Data and other public organizations, in the communities of legal aid in social networks. The anti-digital movement is gaining strength and if the authorities do not hear it, this does not bode well for society.