The last time I found my personal data was being sold on the darknet was Christmas Eve. I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened before: my home address, my birthdate, the names and numbers of my immediate family and other bits of information have been leaked online a dozen times in the past five years following hacks to LinkedIn, Yahoo, Kickstarter, Tumblr and other sites.
I get dozens of targeted emails a day, mostly conspiracy theories I’m somehow involved in, or videos I never open. But thanks to my email filter, they’re filed away into a folder called ‘HEX HIM IF I GO MISSING’, where I list all the information accumulated by counter-surveilling the people who stalk me, allowing me to pretend they don’t scare me. The data you can get on someone you have a vendetta against is (too) easy to procure with the right starting points. Data isn’t secure; it’s brokered. No darknet purchase necessary.
Having to learn how to protect and weaponise personal data became a global conversation when, in March 2018, it was revealed that the British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, under contract of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, had collected data – including fashion preferences – from an estimated 87 million Facebook profiles, and used it to create software to predict and influence US voters’ decisions. This news didn’t surprise me because contemplating how to be seen while still being safe is something I’ve been trying to figure out since I hit puberty. But it did teach me that the military industrial complex has (finally) recognised the politics of aesthetics outside of their own military regalia. What we wear – fashion and beauty, both – does matter. It does shape the world. More than you might have imagined, unfortunately.
Christopher Wylie at #BoFVOICES. Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s keynote speech at The Business of Fashion’s November 2018 Voices event confirmed this epiphany. “Fashion data was used to build AI models to help build the Alt-Right,” he admitted. “We used weaponized algorithms; we used weaponised cultural narratives to undermine people and undermine their perception of reality, and fashion played a big part in that.” While Wylie’s work creating those algorithms was used to help the Trump campaign, the use of these algorithms to influence society isn’t anything new. Trend forecasters and Instagram influencers who know how to market analytics to secure pricey deals do similar things. I would know – I’ve been a trend forecaster, influencer and an AI curator over the past decade.
Wylie and I share a lot of the same traits. He’s been photographed wearing brands I wear and love. We’re both queer immigrants. His hair is green; mine was, too. We’re both devoted to beauty and fashion, and occasionally work with the power it disguises. The difference is, I refuse to teach the AI I work with how to categorise data in ways that can be weaponised.
I can’t speak to his Faustian bargain, but for me, it was an easy move from being another of capitalism’s objets d’art to being one of its (data) curators – it requires less physical labour and the temp agency offered a steadier paycheck. Rather than relying on my own body to be a billboard for a brand by wearing clothes from fashion conglomerates for money, I became part of the larger machine that curated social media. Being in charge of data – randomised, but not necessarily anonymous data such as private moments, scandalous moments, the mundane, etc. – didn’t seduce me into a power hungry stupor. It made me afraid: not of the data per se, but how easily it could be misused. The most important part of my job became refusing to do things. One such example was categorising media by race.
Mark Zuckerberg (2006). Photo: Elena Dorfmann
People of colour are the most heavily surveilled demographic in the world, as well as the most incarcerated. To the programmers, race is just data, an ‘aesthetic event’ turned binary. Yet as the murders of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and other black people in police custody indicate, being seen doesn’t make you more powerful, and surveillance doesn’t necessarily lead to justice. There’s no public US government database that lists the shootings of black people, and it’s not because the records don’t exist – The Washington Post publishes them. Despite this, for many programmers, race is just data, an aesthetic made into binary code. So when we ask for more surveillance, we’re not becoming safer. On the contrary, it only makes things worse for groups that it disproportionately targets – namely, people of colour. Indeed, if race really is just a neutral data category then why, when tested on members of the US congress, did Amazon’s facial recognition technology – software used by some police departments – falsely identify 11 state representatives who happened to be persons of colour as known criminals? And why, prior to 2015, did Google’s image recognition algorithm auto-tag images of black people as ‘gorillas’? Because data capitalism is just the latest form of capitalism, one with biases and skewed results. The data collected about us is mostly used to recognise us as criminals or future customers.
A shoplifter at beauty store Sephora, for example, who is sloppy enough to get caught using the selfie terminals customers use to get product recommendations, would technically be seen as both. Another good example is that, strangely enough, the growing number of white Instagrammers who pretend to be black don’t seem to experience the ill consequences of real-life anti-black surveillance outside of their overly tanned Instagram grids – just the fetishisation, which they hoped for. Race really does matter – and data capitalism has developed to enforce the worst parts of this truism.
It’s not just about what you see or do, but what you like, of course. Amazon’s digital voice-activated assistant Alexa has a database of beauty advice that shapes itself according to your purchase history. It’s a trade-off of efficacy versus privacy, but that bargain shouldn’t be necessary. DNA testing companies like 23andme promise to help you discover your genetic history, but they also sell user data to pharmaceutical companies (and in July last year, GlaxoSmithKline bought a $300 million stake in 23andme). In the US, these pharma companies sell body monitoring devices so they can charge more for prescriptions measured by said monitors. In turn, insurance companies can refuse to cover pharmaceuticals if you don’t do enough exercise with your body monitor on. And both industries buy data from brokers to find more customers to target.
That reads as a tangent but it’s not. Beauty products are often marketed as being as effective as healthcare. Development for pharmaceuticals do influence beauty products, but again, in the US specifically, access to the most effective products requires access to healthcare. Take for instance Spironolactone, a drug often used to treat high blood pressure but which is also prescribed by dermatologists as a treatment for acne. Other examples of skincare treatments that require expensive medical permission include Accutane (a steroid also used to treat acne) and Botox. Over-the-counter products are assumed to be more effective if you spend more money on them, when in reality, the most effective products are only available if you can afford private healthcare.
Our poorly protected data tells brands what we’re most likely to purchase, and there are bots that publish artificial reviews of those products to the sites we frequently visit. The weaker our data privacy laws become, the more often our online lives are used to ‘help’ us purchase specific products from brands that bid high enough to know who we are.
In many avenues of our digital existence, privacy has in fact long since disappeared – but it’s not too late to demand change. It’s not just for your own life, but for the protection of communities who may be far more vulnerable and far more exposed. There’s still time to start more conversations that call out these interconnected industries and hold them accountable for what they’re doing. There’s still time to demand safety, to demand that our lives be shared on our terms, and insist that our identities are ours to use. To demand the thing that beauty has always promised us: the freedom to define our own narratives.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 61, out now.