Harvard Business Review Highlights Dangers of Data Monopolies

A March 27, 2018 article in Harvard Business Review listed "All the Reasons It’s a Bad Idea to Let a Few Tech Companies Monopolize Our Data". Well, the article listed eight threats from data monopolization. Among them were:

Surveillance and security risks.

In a monopolized market, personal data is concentrated in a few firms. Consumers have limited outside options that offer better privacy protection. This raises additional risks, including:
   
Government capture. The fewer the number of firms controlling the personal data, the greater the potential risk that a government will "capture" the firm. Companies need things from government; governments often want access to data. When there are only a few firms, this can increase the likelihood of companies secretly cooperating with the government to provide access to data. China, for example, relies on its data-opolies to better monitor its population.
   
Covert surveillance. Even if the government cannot capture a data-opoly, its rich data-trove increases a government’s incentive to circumvent the data-opoly’s privacy protections to tap into the personal data. Even if the government can’t strike a deal to access the data directly, it may be able to do so covertly.
   
Implications of a data policy violation/security breach. Data-opolies have greater incentives to prevent a breach than do typical firms. But with more personal data concentrated in fewer companies, hackers, marketers, political consultants, among others, have even greater incentives to find ways to circumvent or breach the dominant firm’s security measures. The concentration of data means that if one of them is breached, the harm done could be orders of magnitude greater than with a normal company. While consumers may be outraged, a dominant firm has less reason to worry of consumers’ switching to rivals.

Political concerns.

Economic power often translates into political power. Unlike earlier monopolies, data-opolies, given how they interact with individuals, possess a more powerful tool: namely, the ability to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.

Many people now receive their news from social media platforms. But the news isn’t just passively transmitted. Data-opolies can affect how we feel and think. Facebook, for example, in an "emotional contagion" study, manipulated 689,003 users’ emotions by altering their news feed. Other risks of this sort include:
   
Bias. In filtering the information we receive based on our preferences, data-opolies can reduce the viewpoints we receive, thereby leading to “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.”
   
Censorship. Data-opolies, through their platform, can control or block content that users receive, and enforce governmental censorship of political or religious information.
   
Manipulation. Data-opolies can promote stories that further their particular business or political interests, instead of their relevance or quality.

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