More choice on privacy just means more chances to do what’s best for big tech
The effects of the General Data Protection Regulation have been hard to escape in recent months. But will tech companies defang it?
One of the most influential books published in the last decade was Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In it, the authors set about showing how groundbreaking research into decision-making by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky decades earlier (for which Kahneman later won a Nobel prize) could be applied to public policy. The point of the book, as one psychologist puts it , is that “people are often not the best judges of what will serve their interests, and that institutions, including government, can help people do better for themselves (and the rest of us) with small changes – nudges – in the structure of the choices people face”.
Nudge proved very popular with policymakers because it suggested a strategy for encouraging citizens to make intelligent choices without overtly telling them what to do. Thaler and Sunstein argued that if people are left to their own devices they often make unwise choices and that these mistakes can be mitigated if governments or organisations take an active role in framing those choices. A classic example is trying to ensure that employees have a pension plan. Their employer can encourage them to choose a plan by emphasising the importance of having one. Or they can frame the decision by having every employee enrolled in the company plan by default, with the option of opting out and choosing their own scheme.
Thaler and Sunstein describe their philosophy as “libertarian paternalism”. What it involves is a design approach known as “choice architecture” and in particular controlling the default settings at any point where a person has to make a decision.
Funnily enough, this is something that the tech industry has known for decades. In the mid-1990s, for example, Microsoft – which had belatedly realised the significance of the web – set out to destroy Netscape, the first company to create a proper web browser. Microsoft did this by installing its own browser – Internet Explorer – on every copy of the Windows operating system. Users were free to install Netscape, of course, but Microsoft relied on the fact that very few people ever change default settings. For this abuse of its monopoly power, Microsoft was landed with an antitrust suit that nearly resulted in its breakup. But it did succeed in destroying Netscape.
