Has Google finally grown up? The care with which it has handled facial-recognition technology seems to support this thesis. Compare it with Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg’s social network unveiled its facial-recognition technology in June, it found itself in the middle of a . But Google has avoided that fate: a few weeks ago, it unveiled a technology to in photos uploaded to Google+. Almost nobody noticed.

The different reactions are easy to explain: Facebook enabled this feature for all users without asking their permission, while Google made its tool optional. Facebook may now be warming up to this more-polite approach, too: its stipulates that all future changes to existing privacy controls would require user consent.

The web seems to be moving away from the “opt-out” mentality of the arrogant bully, eg, “We know you’ll love this feature, so we’ll enable it by default!” to the “opt-in” mentality of the smooth-talking diplomat: “Hey, check out this new feature but only if you want.” As Facebook’s embrace of “frictionless sharing” shows, it’s one thing to by altering our privacy settings, and it’s quite another to convince us that sharing is something we really want to do. The former is an offence; the latter is a cause for celebration.

And yet this triumph of the “opt-in” is not all that it seems. While it’s certainly less coercive, any opt-in still makes the underlying technology – automated facial recognition, in this case – seem normal and acceptable. But no technology companies will acknowledge this. “The decision is all in the user’s hands.” “It’s all about giving users more control.” “We are not forcing anyone – people can stay out.” Such bland rhetoric of “user empowerment” has been the staple of Silicon Valley gospel for decades. It rests on a naive belief that technologies are just tools and their impact is quite narrow and limited to accomplishing (or not) the task at hand. Thus, if users want to use Tool X to accomplish Task Y, the only thing up for debate is the desirability of Task Y. That the wide adoption of Tool X may also trigger an unexpected Effect Z never bothers the instrumentalists or, if it does, they just write it off as something incalculable.

Car problem

Alas, such reasoning overlooks the fact that technologies, in addition to serving their immediate functions, also have an ecological footprint – in that they can transform environments, ideologies, users, power relations, and even other technologies. While cars may be a perfectly effective way of getting from Point A to Point B, one shouldn’t focus on this feature alone and disregard what the car culture in general might be doing to the quality and even forms of urban living or pollution rates or mortality statistics. Focusing on the immediate uses of an artefact – regardless of whether those are “opt-in” or “opt-out” – seems like a poor way of navigating the “car problem”.

Similarly, to assume that a given technology isn’t problematic because its users can turn it off seems misguided. Why disregard the possibility that, once enough people opt in to use it, the collective adoption of this technology might dramatically transform the social environment, making non-use difficult or impossible? Once enough Californians have opted in to use the car, something changed, both at the levels of public infrastructure and norms, that makes much of California completely inhospitable to carless living. The car still gets us from Point A to Point B, but wouldn’t our quality of life be much higher if we tried to anticipate its side effects by developing a more multifaceted view of the car technology?

Now, to return to the subject of automated facial-recognition technologies, here is what we know. This technology can be easily abused; a search engine that generates people’s names from their faces would be very popular with dictators, all too keen to crack down on popular protest. We also know that facial-recognition technology has already penetrated many walks of life. It is a popular way to secure our smartphones and laptops. It’s used in many game consoles to create a more personalised gaming experience. It’s used to track (and in real-time!) the number of male and female patrons in bars. And the list goes on.

Such seemingly innocuous uses beget a generation of start-ups that are looking for new uses for this technology, not all of them innocuous but many of them foreseen by its critics. By the time the general public wakes up, of course, this technology becomes so deeply embedded in our culture that it is too late to do anything.

In a sense, we are dealing with a process that is more sinister than the popular notion of the “butterfly effect” – the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. Call it the “Palo Alto effect”: A carefree user in Palo Alto, California, who decides to “opt in” and use Google’s facial-recognition technology ends up strengthening a dictator in Damascus. Why “sinister”? Because the Palo Alto user, unlike the butterfly, can actually think two steps ahead, but prefers not to.

Ethical browsing

What’s to be done? Well, we can put the ethical burden squarely on internet users and sensitise them to the ultimate (even if indirect) consequences of their choices. There are many precedents for this. Mounting concerns over economic inequality, climate change, and child labour have led to the emergence of the “ethical consumption” movement, which seeks to get consumers to consider the ethical ramifications of their behaviour in the marketplace.

In a similar vein, why not think about applying similar concepts to our engagement with the internet? What would “ethical browsing” or “ethical social networking” entail? Never using sites that exploit facial-recognition technology? Refusing to do business with internet companies that cooperate with the US National Security Agency? These are the choices we’ll have to make if we don’t want the internet to become an ethics-free zone. After all, unreflective use of technology – just like unreflective shopping – does not a good citizen make.

But let’s not allow internet companies off the hook, either. Of course, Google and Facebook are different from rapacious corporations exploiting poor farmers or underage children. Neither company is building surveillance tools that would be used by dictators. What they do, however, is help create the apposite technical and ideological infrastructure for such tools to emerge in a seemingly natural manner. This doesn’t provide strong grounds for regulation, but it opens the door for citizen activism, boycotts, and, if all else fails, civil disobedience.

Internet companies know perfectly well that they’ve got responsibilities. Earlier this year, Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and expressed his concern about it. And yet Google has just endorsed this technology, albeit with the “opt-in” proviso. This, Google thinks, shields it from any accusations of unethical behaviour; after all, it’s all up to the user! But would we be persuaded by oil companies claiming that anyone concerned with climate change doesn’t have to drive a Humvee? Perhaps not. It’s in pretending that they don’t know how this sad movie ends that technology companies’ chief ethical blunder becomes evident.

In our rush to celebrate the democratising power of the internet we have forgotten that it can also be a tool for repression

AS RECENT events in Egypt and Tunisia so aptly demonstrate, technology is a double-edged sword: while pro-democracy protesters used sites like Facebook to organise, their governments used the same sites to suppress dissent.

Judging by the failed Iranian uprising of 2009, social media in particular provides dictators with all the information they need for an effective crackdown. Monitoring a revolutionary movement has never been easier – the secret police just need to collect enough tweets and pokes. Thus, while it’s important to recognise the positive contribution that social media can and does make to popular uprisings, it’s equally important to recognise its shortcomings and vulnerabilities.

Many authoritarian regimes have already established a very active presence online. They are constantly designing new tools and learning new tactics that range from producing suave online propaganda to cultivating their own easily controllable alternatives to services like Facebook or Twitter.

Why should we bother studying how dictators exploit the web? There are two main reasons. First, it may help us get a better grasp on how to promote “internet freedom”, a cause that western governments are championing.

Promoters of internet freedom clearly need to understand what is going on. For example, it used to be that authoritarian regimes could tame the web simply by filtering or blocking “harmful” websites. Anyone who wanted to gain access to them would then need to use proxies and tools to get round censorship.

How things have changed. Now authoritarian governments rely on a rapidly expanding panoply of tools and tactics that range from distributed denial-of-service attacks to make websites temporarily unavailable, to spreading malware that helps them to spy on dissidents remotely. Merely funding censorship circumvention tools as a means of weakening authoritarian control no longer seems sufficient and may actually encourage dictators to replace technological controls with social ones, such as pressuring internet companies to remove political comments from their sites.

Another reason why those of us living in democracies should pay more attention to how dictators control the web is because it is the only way to identify and put pressure on western corporations that make such control possible by selling them the equipment.

The Egyptian government had the ability to monitor and intercept traffic passing through their networks thanks to “deep packet inspection” technology by the American firm Narus (owned by Boeing). The Iranian government appears to have used similar equipment sold to them by western companies to spy on its opponents: last year the European parliament for providing Iran’s authorities with “censorship and surveillance technology”. Some fear that the oppressive regime in Belarus used technology supplied by Ericsson to .

Thanks to radical improvements in technologies such as face recognition, it may become even easier for the secret police to track their opponents. Here, too, there is a cut-throat competition among western firms, who rightly smell lucrative commercial opportunities – wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those online photos of your friends could be tagged automatically? And yet you can almost guarantee that such technologies would be abused by authoritarian states. The way in which we choose to regulate such technologies in the west can really define – and perhaps, even limit – their contribution to political oppression.

Sadly, the likes of Facebook and Twitter do not have a spotless record on digital activism. For all the celebration of their role in facilitating democratic change, neither company has so far joined the , a group of companies, civil organisations and academics committed to upholding human rights and freedom of expression in telecommunications (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all joined). Many dissidents around the globe are unhappy that because their profiles bear pseudonyms, not their real names.

Realising the democratising potential of the internet won’t be easy and, on the whole, it’s perhaps a good sign that the US government is so keen on internet freedom. However, as activists in authoritarian states have told me, the biggest contribution that Washington can make to this fight is to first solve numerous problems in its own backyard. Getting US companies to stop selling technology to authoritarian states that are likely to abuse it would be a good first step; having Facebook, Twitter and others commit to some shared set of democratic norms would be a good second.

Companies aside, the biggest challenge to internet freedom lies in western democracies themselves, where law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to assert greater control over our networks. The rapid securitisation of cyberspace is particularly severe in the US, where the government, spooked by the WikiLeaks saga, is opting for a more aggressive watch over the internet.

The fact that the US government is trying to export internet freedom abroad while limiting it at home is not lost on its adversaries, who skillfully exploit such hypocrisy for propaganda. The push to promote internet freedom should aim as much inward as it does outward.