Eurasia Risks 2021 – Digital Totalitarianism
Highly connected ecosystems of digital devices will enable the harvest, repurpose and sale of sensitive behavioural data about individuals without their consent. There are also a growing number of sectors that will see an increased dependency on behavioural analytics, including finance, healthcare and education.
Steve Durbin, Chief Executive of the ISF
The pandemic has demonstrated convincingly the fact that technologies designed to facilitate communication are actively used to massively and uncontrollably collect personal information from the population.
As a result of the colossal concentration of personal data in the hands of global players in the information technology market, “digital control” over the lives of citizens becomes total, actively invading the jurisdictions of nation states around the world. In 2021, the countries of Eurasia will face a difficult choice of format and model for their further digital transformation from complete market freedom in the digital sphere to a more rigid and unambiguous definition of the boundaries of digital sovereignty.
“BRAVE NEW WORLD”
The pandemic was the starting point for the finalization of the Data Economy and Data Society. At the center of the new format of the economic structure and business models is the digitized personality. Personal data is becoming the main economic category: the “oil of the XXI century.” In the new digital society, the main task is to establish control over information by analogy with managing the flows of world finance and natural resources.
The largest players in the digital information market, such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Tencent and others, accumulate colossal streams of metadata on their platforms, simultaneously exerting a large-scale impact on social, cultural and even political processes in societies around the world.
A fivefold increase in the volume of data generated by government services, companies and citizens by 2025 will allow the owners of information “banks” of data to obtain an unprecedented level of access to a person’s private life in history.