The digital wild west proves there’s a sucker born every minute

Maybe we really don’t care that we’re being data-mined.

There was a revealing detail in the story of the five Manchester University students jailed for selling more than £800,000 ($1.46 million) worth of drugs. They used the dark web and bitcoin payments, funded flashy holidays and compared themselves to the antihero of the TV drama Breaking Bad.

But when they posted the parcels around the world there was a traceable return address and, said the investigators, “their fingerprints were all over them ... they had amateur forensic awareness”. Highly intelligent, up with the mysteries of bitcoin and secret servers, they were less savvy about criminal precautions than any great aunt in the 1950s with an Agatha Christie in her knitting bag.

For me it chimed with the wider naivety of the digital age. In glorious ways the internet makes us better informed, more connected, speeds up commerce, learning and argument, keeps affectionate conversations alive and saves time (when it doesn’t steal it). It’s mainly a boon. But it does have an unexpected psychological effect, creating a dreamy otherworld as our minds and identities float through the screen into an untouchable nowhere. There was a wonderfully scornful line by the comedian Jack Dee about surfing the net: “No, mate, you’re not surfing. You’re in your bedroom, typing.” For teenagers, social media and smartphone porn can replace hanging out in bus shelters and attempting awkward snogs. In offices the intranet is the new water-cooler; online retailers replace a walk to the shops.

We can get round that, notice when we haven’t physically moved all day, put down the phone, shake ourselves out of it. But the deeper effect of the cloudy, beguiling world behind the screen is that universal “connectivity” can blind us to the solid and obvious. Those student drug dealers forgot about the biology of fingerprints. In an experiment conducted by the cybersecurity company
F-Secure, people who would never sign an unread physical document from a random bloke in a mask rapidly ticked “terms and conditions” for free Wi-Fi when one of the conditions, had they looked, was “relinquish your firstborn child”. The most common passwords online are 123456 and “password”. And a billion Facebookers apparently never gave a thought to the fact they were laying out personal information on an invisible platform controlled by strangers.

There is outrage, rightly, about the behaviour of Cambridge Analytica and the dark political uses of profiling and targeting. But honestly, did nobody expect something like that to happen? We all know about “cookies”, often a condition of using a site, so that one absent-minded search for yoga pants will get us haunted for months by pictures of garish Lycra leggings. Clickbait tempts us all. A lot of us can’t resist doing self-evaluating “surveys” online for fun, although rarely do these ask: “Are you really a complete sucker?”

We think we are in charge. We forget that technology advances but human nature is perennial, and that there never was any such thing as a free lunch. It is unusual in human history to expect meticulous security and considerate personal care from distant corporations that are giving us marvellously intricate systems and funny little emojis, yet not charging us a bean. We ignore the fact that something has to fund their sprauncy buildings, and it’s probably us.

A few of us stick-in-the-muds take basic, cautious procedures, use paid-for email addresses and intricate passwords, eschew Facebook and grumpily use Twitter merely to signal professional work or support campaigns, not as a detailed diary of our days and meals.

But we are dinosaurs. Rolling naked in free stuff is tempting. Being made of shimmering pixels, it seems to exist in a different world from the solid practicalities of life. Maybe we really don’t care that we’re being data-mined: I have a horrid suspicion that the outrage about Cambridge Analytica is not actually all that widespread beyond political and media circles. As for news sites, despite all the evidence that decent journalism can’t survive on thin air and that a worse kind is eager to take over, there are still a lot of voices saying paywalls are evil and undemocratic and the BBC licence fee an outrage.

There’s a kind of babyish softness in a society so mercifully gentle by global standards. Some of it is the result of a regulated, super-civilised regime in which the buyer need hardly beware, and everything is assumed to be padded for our safety. Those people who ticked yes to the terms and conditions asking for their firstborn child probably wouldn’t have been too bothered even if they had read it. They would assume that laws about consumer protection, child safety and unfair contract terms would save them.

We trust terrifying roller-coasters and fail to look out for potholes. We buy food from dingy kebab stalls because we assume that there are inspectors on the case. Some ring 000 when KFC runs out of chicken or to ask whether it’s safe to put cracked eggs in the fridge; most expect the public health service to cover anything from a stubbed toe to a nose job. We fail to read artful conditions about airline charges (they were always there, we just clicked past them), so aviation authorities must step in to make everything as clear as a Janet and John first reader.

We’re a soft lot. We’d never survive in the wild. And we fail to notice that for all the shiny, friendly emojis, the internet is the wild.

The Times