If free nations demand companies store data locally, it legitimizes that practice for authoritarian nations which can then steal that data for their own nefarious purposes, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He laid out the threat in a new 93-minute video of a discussion with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari released today as part of Zuckerberg’s 2019 personal challenge of holding public talks on the future of tech.
Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook will refuse to comply with laws and set up local data centers in authoritarian countries where that data could be snatched.
Mark Zuckerberg speaks with Yuval Noah Harari
Russia and China already have data localization laws, but privacy concerns and regulations proposals could see more nations adopt the restrictions. Germany now requires telecommunications metadata to be stored locally, and India does something similar for payments data.
While in Democratic or justly-ruled nations, the laws can help protect user privacy and give governments more leverage over tech companies, they pave the way for similar laws in nations where governments might use military might to see the data. That could enhance their surveillance capabilities, disrupt activism, or hunt down dissidents.
Zuckerberg explains that:
When I look towards the future, one of the things that I just get very worried about is the values that I just laid out [for the internet and data] are not values that all countries share. And when you get into some of the more authoritarian countries and their data policies, they’re very different from the kind of regulatory frameworks that across Europe and across a lot of other places, people are talking about or put into place . . . And the most likely alternative to each country adopting something that encodes the freedoms and rights of something like GDPR, in my mind, is the authoritarian model, which is currently being spread, which says every company needs to store everyone’s data locally in data centers and then, if I’m a government, I can send my military there and get access to whatever data I want and take that for surveillance or military. I just think that that’s a really bad future. And that’s not the direction, as someone who’s building one of these internet services, or just as a citizen of the world, I want to see the world going. If a government can get access to your data, then it can identify who you are and go lock you up and hurt you and your family and cause real physical harm in ways that are just really deep.”
That makes the assumption that authoritarian governments care about their decisions being previously legitimized, which might not be true. But for nations in the middle of the spectrum of human rights and just law, seeing role model countries adopt these laws might convince them it’s alright.
Zuckerberg said on this week’s Facebook earnings call that Facebook accepts the risks to its business of being shut down in authoritarian countries where it refuses to comply with data localization laws.
We’ll have more analysis on Zuckerberg’s talk soon. Here’s the full transcript:
Mark Zuckerberg: Hey everyone. This year I’m doing a series of public discussions on the future of the internet and society and some of the big issues around that, and today I’m here with Yuval Noah Harari, a great historian and best-selling author of a number of books. His first book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, kind of chronicled and did an analysis going from the early days of hunter-gatherer society to now how our civilization is organized, and your next two books, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, actually tackle important issues of technology and the future, and that’s I think a lot of what we’ll talk about today. But most historians only tackle and analyze the past, but a lot of the work that you’ve done has had really interesting insights and raised important questions for the future. So I’m really glad to have an opportunity to talk with you today. So Yuval, thank you for joining for this conversation.
Yuval Noah Harari: I’m happy to be here. I think that if historians and philosophers cannot engage with the current questions of technology and the future of humanity, then we aren’t doing our jobs. Only you’re not just supposed to chronicle events centuries ago. All the people that lived in the past are dead. They don’t care. The question is what happens to us and to the people in the future.
Mark Zuckerberg: So all the questions that you’ve outlined– where should we start here? I think one of the big topics that we’ve talked about is around– this dualism around whether, with all of the technology and progress that has been made, are people coming together, and are we becoming more unified, or is our world becoming more fragmented? So I’m curious to start off by how you’re thinking about that. That’s probably a big area. We could probably spend most of the time on that topic.
Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, I mean, if you look at the long span of history, then it’s obvious that humanity is becoming more and more connected. If thousands of years ago Planet Earth was actually a galaxy of a lot of isolated worlds with almost no connection between them, so gradually people came together and became more and more connected, until we reach today when the entire world for the first time is a single historical, economic, and cultural unit. But connectivity doesn’t necessarily mean harmony. The people we fight most often are our own family members and neighbors and friends. So it’s really a question of are we talking about connecting people, or are we talking about harmonizing people? Connecting people can lead to a lot of conflicts, and when you look at the world today, you see this duality in– for example, in the rise of wall, which we talked a little bit about earlier when we met, which for me is something that I just can’t figure out what is happening, because you have all these new connecting technology and the internet and virtual realities and social networks, and then the most– one of the top political issues becomes building walls, and not just cyber-walls or firewalls– building stone walls; like the most Stone Age technology is suddenly the most advanced technology. So how to make sense of this world which is more connected than ever, but at the same time is building more walls than ever before.
Mark Zuckerberg: I think one of the interesting questions is around whether there’s actually so much of a conflict between these ideas of people becoming more connected and this fragmentation that you talk about. One of the things that it seems to me is that– in the 21st century, in order to address the biggest opportunities and challenges that humanity– I think it’s both opportunities– spreading prosperity, spreading peace, scientific progress– as well as some of the big challenges– addressing climate change, making sure, on the flipside, that diseases don’t spread and there aren’t epidemics and things like that– we really need to be able to come together and have the world be more connected. But at the same time, that only works if we as individuals have our economic and social and spiritual needs met. So one way to think about this is in terms of fragmentation, but another way to think about it is in terms of personalization. I just think about when I was growing up– one of the big things that I think that the internet enables is for people to connect with groups of people who share their real values and interests, and it wasn’t always like this. Before the internet, you were really tied to your physical location, and I just think about how when I was growing up– I grew up in a town of about 10 thousand people, and there were only so many different clubs or activities that you could do. So I grew up, like a lot of the other kids, playing Little League baseball. And I kind of think about this in retrospect, and it’s like, “I’m not really into baseball. I’m not really an athlete. So why did I play Little League when my real passion was programming computers?” And the reality was that growing up, there was no one else really in my town who was into programming computers, so I didn’t have a peer group or a club that I could do that. It wasn’t until I went to boarding school and then later college where I actually was able to meet people who were into the same things as I am. And now I think with the internet, that’s starting to change, and now you have the availability to not just be tethered to your physical location, but to find people who have more niche interests and different kind of subcultures and communities on the internet, which I think is a really powerful thing, but it also means that me growing up today, I probably wouldn’t have played Little League, and you can think about me playing Little League as– that could have been a unifying thing, where there weren’t that many things in my town, so that was a thing that brought people together. So maybe if I was creating– or if I was a part of a community online that might have been more meaningful to me, getting to know real people but around programming, which was my real interest, you would have said that our community growing up would have been more fragmented, and people wouldn’t have had the same kind of sense of physical community. So when I think about these problems, one of the questions that I wonder is maybe– fragmentation and personalization, or finding what you actually care about, are two sides of the same coin, but the bigger challenge that I worry about is whether– there are a number of people who are just left behind in the transition who were people who would have played Little League but haven’t now found their new community, and now just feel dislocated; and maybe their primary orientation in the world is still the physical community that they’re in, or they haven’t really been able to find a community of people who they’re interested in, and as the world has progressed– I think a lot of people feel lost in that way, and that probably contributes to some of the feelings. That would my hypothesis, at least. I mean, that’s the social version of it. There’s also the economic version around globalization, which I think is as important, but I’m curious what you think about that.
Yuval Noah Harari: About the social issue, online communities can be a wonderful thing, but they are still incapable of replacing physical communities, because there are still so many things–
Mark Zuckerberg: That’s definitely true. That’s true.
Yuval Noah Harari: –that you can only do with your body, and with your physical friends, and you can travel with your mind throughout the world but not with your body, and there is huge questions about the cost and benefits there, and also the ability of people to just escape things they don’t like in online communities, but you can’t do it in real offline communities. I mean, you can unfriend your Facebook friends, but you can’t un-neighbor your neighbors. They’re still there. I mean, you can take yourself and move to another country if you have the means, but most people can’t. So part of the logic of traditional communities was that you must learn how to get along with people you don’t like necessarily, maybe, and you must develop social mechanisms how to do that; and with online communities– I mean, and they have done some really wonderful things for people, but also they kind of don’t give us the experience of doing these difficult but important things.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I definitely don’t mean to state that online communities can replace everything that a physical community did. The most meaningful online communities that we see are ones that span online and offline, that bring people together– maybe the original organization might be online, but people are coming together physically because that ultimately is really important for relationships and for– because we’re physical beings, right? So whether it’s– there are lots of examples around– whether it’s an interest community, where people care about running but they also care about cleaning up the environment, so a group of organize online and then they meet every week, go for a run along a beach or through a town and clean up garbage. That’s a physical thing. We hear about communities where people– if you’re in a profession, in maybe the military or maybe something else, where you have to move around a lot, people form these communities of military families or families of groups that travel around, and the first thing they do when they go to a new city is they find that community and then that’s how they get integrated into the local physical community too. So that’s obviously a super important part of this, that I don’t mean to understate.
Yuval Noah Harari: Yeah, and then the question– the practical question for also a service provider like Facebook is: What is the goal? I mean, are we trying to connect people so ultimately they will leave the screens and go and play football or pick up garbage, or are we trying to keep them as long as possible on the screens? And there is a conflict of interest there. I mean, you could have– one model would be, “We want people to stay as little as possible online. We just need them to stay there the shortest time necessary to form the connection, which they will then go and do something in the outside world,” and that’s one of the key questions I think about what the internet is doing to people, whether it’s connecting them or fragmenting society.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I think your point is right. I mean, we basically went– we’ve made this big shift in our systems to make sure that they’re optimized for meaningful social interactions, which of course the most meaningful interactions that you can have are physical, offline interactions, and there’s always this question when you’re building a service of how you measure the different thing that you’re trying to optimize for. So it’s a lot easier for us to measure if people are interacting or messaging online than if you’re having a meaningful connection physically, but there are ways to get at that. I mean, you can ask people questions about what the most meaningful things that they did– you can’t ask all two billion people, but you can have a statistical subsample of that, and have people come in and tell you, “Okay, what are the most meaningful things that I was able to do today, and how many of them were enabled by me connecting with people online, or how much of it was me connecting with something physically, maybe around the dinner table, with content or something that I learned online or saw.” So that is definitely a really important part of it. But I think one of the important and interesting questions is about the richness of the world that can be built where you have, on one level, unification or this global connection, where there’s a common framework where people can connect. Maybe it’s through using common internet services, or maybe it’s just common social norms as you travel around. One of the things that you pointed out to me in a previous conversation is now something that’s different from at any other time in history is you could travel to almost any other country and look like you– dress like you’re appropriate and that you fit in there, and 200 years ago or 300 years ago, that just wouldn’t have been the case. If you went to a different country, you would have just stood out immediately. So there’s this norm– there’s this level of cultural norm that is united, but then the question is: What do we build on top of that? And I think one of the things that a broader kind of set of cultural norms or shared values and framework enables is a richer set of subcultures and subcommunities and people to actually go find the things that they’re interested in, and lots of different communities to be created that wouldn’t have existed before. Going back to my story before, it wasn’t just my town that had Little League. I think when I was growing up, basically every town had very similar things– there’s a Little League in every town– and maybe instead of every town having Little League, there should be– Little League should be an option, but if you wanted to do something that not that many people were interested in– in my case, programming; in other people’s case, maybe interest in some part of history or some part of art that there just may not be another person in your ten-thousand-person town who share that interest– I think it’s good if you can form those kind of communities, and now people can find connections and can find a group of people who share their interests. I think that there’s a question of– you can look at that as fragmentation, because now we’re not all doing the same things, right? We’re not all going to church and playing Little League and doing the exact same things. Or you can think about that as richness and depth-ness in our social lives, and I just think that that’s an interesting question, is where you want the commonality across the world and the connection, and where you actually want that commonality to enable deeper richness, even if that means that people are doing different things. I’m curious if you have a view on that and where that’s positive versus where that creates a lack of social cohesion.
Yuval
source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/26/facebook-data-localization/
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