Opinion: We need a new social contract for the Information Age

This month, an investigation revealed that OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, contravened B.C.'s private sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection Act, when they scraped vast amounts of personal information from publicly accessible websites to train their models without any type of consent recognized under the law, writes Michael Harvey, B.C.'s information and privacy commissioner. Photo by OLIVIER MORIN /AFP via Getty Images

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I’m the proud father of a lapsed social media influencer.

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A couple of years ago, my wife and I learned that our daughter had built a following of tens of thousands of people who shared her love of film. She didn’t hide it from us, exactly, but she didn’t want us or her friends to know about it. She was doing what teenagers have always done — exploring who she was, forming her identity, finding her people. For many people in the Information Age, that happens online.

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She was diligent about concealing her identity and thought she had control over her story.

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But while she was anonymous to her followers, the platform knew her well — not just what she posted, but where she posted from, her age, gender, the things she likes and the people she knows. All of this was fed into systems making even more inferences, shaping what the platform was showing her and the people in her network, and ultimately manipulating their behaviour. Her information was being collected and used in ways she couldn’t be expected to comprehend, let alone consent to.

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My daughter’s experience (and, yes, she has given me the OK to share it) spoke to a fundamental tension between our aspirations for our children in the Information Age and the exploitative reality in which those hopes are constrained.

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She should have been able to express herself and her creativity, to find community and exercise her autonomy, without having to sacrifice her privacy. Instead, her data was treated as a resource to be exploited.

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This has become the status quo, a prerequisite to participate in modern life. But consider what we’re giving up. In the Information Age, our personal information isn’t just “about us,” it’s us — our personhood, our behaviours, our stories.

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There’s a deep imbalance between what we sacrifice to participate in modern society, and what we receive in return. That is because, decades into the Information Age, we lack a viable social contract for it.

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Social contracts have long formed the foundation of trust between people and governments and organizations. They’re built on mutual obligations. It took decades before the environmental disasters and human rights abuses of the Industrial Revolution were put in check by societies demanding better through laws and regulations.

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In many ways they still haven’t been. That reciprocity is absent between today’s tech platforms and the societies in which they operate. We need to learn from the successes and failures of the previous age for today’s world.

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As B.C.’s privacy commissioner, I believe that the conversations happening in homes across the province are ones we need to be having at policy tables in B.C. and beyond. We need to write a new social contract for the Information Age to make sure that our digital world works for us, and not vice versa.

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That starts with reforming privacy laws that have been strained to the breaking point by new technologies.