consumer data – Social Blog

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Imagine powerful tech companies such as Google knew about every single item that you have purchased, both offline and online, in your entire life. Now skip the imagination, because if you were to use an online payment platform your entire life, they would.

As more and more people use online payment services for their own convenience, online payment platforms are fast gaining in popularity. One of such online payment platforms is Alipay. Alipay is a Chinese mobile and online payment platform that was created as the payment arm of the large Chinese eCommerce website called Taobao (Ant Group). With over 1 billion users, Alipay says they have created “an inclusive digital ecosystem accessible to everyone” (Alipay, n.d.).

They make it sound great. Yet, there are concerns that Alipay is so dominant that no one can compete with them (Ovide, 2020). As a result, China decided to break up Alipay last month (Yu & McMorrow, 2021). To understand how Alipay can be ‘broken up’, it is important to first understand how Alipay operates. The image shows the revenue streams of Alipay (Cuofano, n.d.). As you can see, their revenues consist of escrow fees, also known as transaction fees, ancillary services and credit pay instalment fees. The latter refers to the highly lucrative lending business and is, not surprisingly, the part China wants to separate from Alipay.
In addition to separating Alipay’s lending business from its main business, officials have stated they want the separated business to have its own independent app. Notably, this would require Ant Group to turn over the user data that determines its lending decisions to a new credit scoring joint venture, which would be partly state-owned (Yu & McMorrow, 2021). The main reason being that big tech’s monopoly of power comes from their control of data, and China wants to end that.

Though it might seem just to control a company that becomes ‘too’ powerful due to possession of user data, it feels unjust that a government can restrict this way of operating by obliging an online platform to be split-up and most importantly, hand over the data.

This raises the modern dilemma on data: who is morally justified to take data ownership, and thus become powerful?

References
Alipay. (n.d.). Accessible digital payments for everyone. Retrieved from https://global.alipay.com/platform/site/ihome
Cuofano, G. (n.d.). How Does Alipay Make Money? The Alipay Business Model in a Nutshell. Retrieved from https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-alipay-make-money/
Ovide, S. (2020). Don’t Even Try Paying Cash in China. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/technology/alipay-china.html
Yu, S., & McMorrow, R. (2021). Beijing to break up Ant’s Alipay and force creation of separate loans app. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/01b7c7ca-71ad-4baa-bddf-a4d5e65c5d79

Google Home – the always-listening connected speaker. Welcome to the next generation of consumer data collection. At Alphabet’s hardware launch event last week, the company unveiled it’s answer to Amazon’s Echo: a wireless speaker with a set of microphones built into it, allowing the neat little device to continuously listen to you. A physical “mute” button on top let’s you tell it to stop listening, and actually, that’s the most interesting thing about it – Google Home listens to you by default.

Our personal devices are becoming more personal than we ever could have imagined, and Google Home is a clear testament to that. The company has positioned itself right at the heart of consumer data, with access to unlimited, highly personal information. It’s always listening, always learning. TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas put it perfectly, “in other words, your daily business is Google’s business.”

Personal spaces like your home and office are being turned into gold mines of consumer data, all fueling Google’s AI technology. That’s the nature of machine learning, it needs information to become useful. In order to give you suggestions on where you might like to eat or what the traffic’s like on your commute to work, it needs to continuously harvest your personal information, preferences etc. and learn, infinitely. It sounds a little paranoid, but that’s the raw truth. When I first heard about Google Home (and the rest of Google’s hardware line), I was pretty excited, to be honest. Besides its good-looks, it seemed Google was in a better position than anyone to pull off an AI-powered home device, which added huge appeal. Having had a bit of a think, however, I’m somewhat nervous about giving them total unobstructed access to the most personal aspects of my life…

AI is becoming an integral part of our lives, the more we find utility in it, and businesses like Google are tapping directly into that in order to profit in a multitude of ways. Google Home offers direct access to our most personal spaces, and it’s difficult to deny that it feels a little invasive – but then that depends on your perspective, I guess. In any case, it seems we may have come to a crossroads; we need to ask ourselves if we’re ready to give up that access and, perhaps more to the point, are we to gain or to lose from doing so?

It seems pretty clear to me: consumer data is the currency of the future, and Google is going to be absolutely swimming in it.

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/04/say-hello-to-google-home/
https://madeby.google.com/home/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/not-ok-google/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/technology/google-to-introduce-its-voice-activated-home-device.html?_r=1
https://thescene.com/watch/wired/google-is-changing-its-gadget-game?source=player_scene_logo

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