Navigating through racial injustice, the gig economy and transparency, Mozilla Firefox’s Internet Health report 2020 touches various aspects. It goes beyond the realms of data privacy and secrecy.
One couldn’t talk about the COVID-19 pandemic without mentioning two things—home quarantine and how the internet was the life saviour. YouTube, Netflix and Prime Amazon subscriptions and frequent video calls are helping us wade through the raging pandemic. Work from home (WFH) became a necessity for every organisation to keep their businesses running. We were muffled up in the blanket of the internet, every day, every moment.
As a resource or a facilitator of ideas, the internet has been through a lot more than we can imagine, everything but peace. Internet was supposed to be a platform promoting equality and a medium of sharing information. Still, the disparities seem to hinder its purpose. India may have a massive smartphone-using population; ironically, it is a victim of digital inequality. Access to the internet remains uneven demographically, while the government authorities ask and collect responses through online services. It is a complete oxymoron.
What’s all the buzz about the internet health?
Going beyond the usual notions of internet health, Mozilla publishes a fascinating Internet Health Report (https://2020.internethealthreport.org/) each year. It highlights the pressing issues of the year gone by and the way forward. Internet health concerns go beyond the domain of data privacy and security. What the world saw in 2020 was how data access and restrictions played a role in the everyday lives of its internet users.
Providing a unique perspective to its readers, the 2020 Firefox Internet Health Report talks about three crucial issues: racial injustice, gig economy and transparency. A statement from the report, “together, from different angles and intersections and regions, we can work in the direction of people over profits, and internet health and trustworthy AI over consolidation and control,” puts a strong emphasis on what ought to be the current concern.
Internet was driven by the tonnes of private and community data being circulated all year round. News regarding worker migrations, people helping a local farmer to sell his produce via Twitter, growth of home-based food businesses, and the ever-expanding craze of online grocery shopping made the internet a sole communicator for billions of people world-over. A lady who usually inspects vegetables in a physical bazaar began trusting and exploring online grocery shopping. It seemingly meant less risk and more reliability.
Diverse data for inclusivity
Data empowers our products and services; tampering with it will harm humankind in a nasty way. The only way to achieve sound and inclusive internet space is diversity lies at the core of our data. Twenty-twenty saw the mass movement creating a storm of words on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag—Black lives matter. A people’s movement that shook the conscience of the US citizens reached every corner of the world, urging every person to ponder upon the narrow-mindedness thriving in an ever-developing world.
The report identifies racial injustice steering into a direction we consider unimportant and almost invisible. Racial injustice is not only regressive but depressive and disgusting. It reflects and makes itself evident through the various services offered by big companies. Years ago, a California-based researcher typed ‘black girls’ in the search bar. Hundreds of pornographic images filled the result pages. The internet has no brain of its own to come up with such ghastly results. It is the kind of information fed to the internet, available to all. When she published her book wherein she wrote her experience, it was known to all. Consequently, Google revised its search results, showing more positive images thereon.
Besides this upsetting ignorance and fragmented information, a lack of diversity in culture, ethnicity and backgrounds is quite clearly seen from the software developers, executives and tech experts. With growing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) requiring vast amounts of data sets for better and widely accepted results, diversity in data sets is of utmost importance. In its absence, the result is a biased ‘white internet,’ making it a default one. An entry of other content besides this seems bizarre and unconventional.
The plight of an independent worker
Lack of adequate data sets not only deprives us of good quality services but leads to ignorance too. The employees working at lower levels of the hierarchy have no understanding of how their companies work and how services are assessed. The dos and don’ts often go unannounced before the person starts working on the job, leading to an absence of clarity regarding work ethics. The employee has no clue about how they could better their performance to get an increment. Some organisations often keep their employees in the dark. In contrast, the employee sweats daily to get a raise without even understanding the right factors to help them get a raise.
The report picks a classic case of a cab driver. An Uber or Ola cab driver is an independent person but answerable to some agent who has given them the ride. The driver has no clue how their work performance is being assessed and its impact on the final take-home. If they must fail to provide a service, they are deprived of a certain amount of income. When the same person complains about a particular customer, it is unanswered. This does not happen all the time. Even a single case or complaint from the employee must be considered and investigated. The rising importance of safeguarding workspaces and employee protection has made company managers and committees, in recent times, further investigate such things to create transparency and faith in their services.
A need towards bettering the lives of gig workers has arisen because “an estimated 50 million gig workers worldwide toil within ecosystems created by online platforms such as Uber, Ola Cabs, iFood, Grab and more,” as quoted from the report. Being a gig worker is embracing independence and risk at the same time. While one is independent of setting self-targets, one is also vulnerable to the dangers of no cover and no help. The definition of gig worker unintentionally goes through an identity crisis. Moreover, each country has its way of assessing the performance of these workers based on country-specific principles. How is one independent worker supposed to claim for their rights in such a volatile environment?
Some dark stains on transparency
This brings us to the third layer of our giant internet pie; transparency. The report takes us through a definition of transparency we are familiar with but often ignore. Fortunately, social media, though not entirely, but to a certain extent, has helped voice out concerns. A person unable to reach out to the organisation often chooses to express on social media platforms.
At times big companies lack clarity regarding their services. These go numb and silent when asked for answers. The fact is, they do not have sufficient tools to support their answers, offer solutions and give justice to end-users. The report does not talk about transparency in a true sense, limiting only to the exposure and secrecy of personal data. It digs deeper into things like the unaccountability of the companies and missing data related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and alike. To fix unaccountability, focus on transparency is the way forward.
Together, as data miners, tech experts, company managers, we can bring transparency in sharp focus, making it a priority. This way, we could find answers and be well-defined about the company contribution to CSR and other initiatives to help build a better image. Having feasible tools would help initially in this process. The more companies are compelled to make these changes, the more we can put our faith in their services. An opaque internet is by no means appealing; it invites more wrongdoings and unhealthy secrecy, risking the lives of millions of users.
The right to ‘quality’ internet access
Transparency also means access to quality content and valuable information is everybody’s right. Work from home (WFH) was forced upon every person working in formal employment sectors. Twitter, last year, told its employees to ‘work from home’ forever. The WFH culture spread like a forest fire. Indian companies like Tata Steel, Wipro, Infosys, and many more have introduced a permanent or choice-based decision of WFH. Though it is less hectic, timesaving and comforting, not everyone enjoys it the way we portray it as a better option to working from formal workplaces. Have companies, who have made it mandatory for their employees to go on either complete or partial WFH, provided them with the required space and services? Now some of them must-have, not necessarily each of those could have. In a market like India, the digital divide, economic disparities, and smaller residential accommodations make WFH a lot more unequal across the spectrum of employees.
Amusingly, the internet was never free, neither in terms of money nor in terms of the liberty to use it. As a country, we might be an exponentially growing hub of smartphone buyers. Still, not every person sitting with a mobile phone can access the various benefits of the internet. End users’ income capacity, disrupted internet access and the ability to differentiate between the right and wrong content changes the way they experience the internet.
The world of the internet is like a horse with blinkers. It is focused, fast-paced and ever-growing but uninformed and partially blind to the various concerns of its users. It is time; we set it free, free to choose the content that seeps in and makes it stronger and robust. That is when tech experts and software developers must jump in to make it more inclusive, vibrant and safe. Transparency is the key to curb racial injustice or gender injustice, or any unfair treatment. Without transparency, no commoner would ever be able to get the same and just treatment.
Drafted by Aditi Taskar, Senior Consultant (2019-2020) at Ascharya Creative Communications
Data sources
- Pie chart: 2020 Internet Health Report slide show. Accessed on June 8, 2021.
- Row chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/. Accessed on June 8, 2021.
- Pie chart: 2020 Internet Health Report slide show. Accessed on June 8, 2021.
