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The 21st century is an era filled with technological advancements, and among those are the advancements in data science. Such advancements allow the next generation of entrepreneurial ventures in the consumer-centric economy to use the data that their customers generate to improve their product or their sales. These companies succeed in part because they are able to personalize their product to their customers training Artificial Intelligence models on the customer data. Unfortunately, this is at the expense of the customer's private and personal data being sold and used for company profit, and this creates tremendous negative social and political change.

This presentation will focus on four companies (Amazon, Netflix,  Google, and Facebook) founded near the beginning of the 21st century, and how their rapid growth due to the accessibility of consumer data has caused negative social and political changes.

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While in the 21st century, the growth of the economy has led to successful entrepreneurial ventures, such businesses have generated and continue to generate negative social and political change through the increased accessibility of consumer data in the digital world.

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Amazon is an online retailer founded at the turn of the century and mainly sold books. It started to expand its scope, and within fifteen years, it became the largest retailer in the country. Currently, Amazon is not only the world's largest online marketplace, but it also has sub-ventures like diapers.com, Zappos, Audible, Amazon Music, Amazon Video, and AWS(Amazon Web Services) which powers 40% of all cloud services including Netflix, Pinterest and Fortnite!

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This graphic shows the relative size of Amazon compared to all other large retailers in the United States in 2016. It is clear to see that Amazon is bigger, or has a larger market capitalization, than all other retailers combined. The bottom half of the graphic shows the change in valuation from 2006 to 2016. It is again evident that Amazon grows exponentially(1,934%!) while the other retailers decrease significantly in value.

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Netflix is a video/movie streaming company formed in 1997. They originally rented out DVDs to their customers via mail, but have since created an online streaming service. As of 2013, Netflix have created a production branch to make original content like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Stranger Things.

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The above chart from 2015 shows Netflix's dominance over the other internet media companies as it has the highest downstream internet traffic of all websites in North America. Not only is it the largest internet media provider, but it has more than double the amount of internet traffic as Youtube, its closest competitor in this regard. It is also important to note that among the list of competitors for most internet downstream traffic are Youtube, Facebook, and Amazon Video, owned by Google Inc., Facebook Inc., and Amazon Inc. respectively. This just shows the amount of power these 21st century growth companies have accumulated in the 'digital age'.

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Netflix, much like Amazon, has gained revenue and market share due to its excellent data operations. Netflix also employs 'Recommender Systems' to recommend movies to users. This evidently has helped to keep users on Netflix, and as a result of increased time viewing Netflix, users are more drawn to continue to pay Netflix's subscription fee. Netflix benefits immensely from this but there are many negative social impacts to this. Firstly, the addictive nature of Netflix decreases the number of people going out for movies, and a new phenomenon called 'binge-watching' has emerged in society which is a rather large social problem. A particular event that sparked the massive growth of Netflix was February 1st, 2013. This was the date 'House of Cards' was released on Netflix, and although this doesn't seem very significant, it was. This was the turning point for the Netflix stock, and the stock price began to rise steadily. At this point, Netflix not only had a video streaming service, but it also had a production company to make original content. Over the past few years, Netflix has destroyed the cable industry including Giants like Verizon, Comcast, and TimeWarner Cable because Netflix has the edge of data science and Artificial Intelligence. Through its consumer data, Netflix is able to see the shows that perform well, and the demographics that watch those shows. Given this information, Netflix is able to create their own shows based on their data insights much like Amazon's 'Amazon Basics' brand that wipes out the smaller competition. This would pose a threat to any startup in the film/production industry, which has a clear negative social impact.

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Amazon's growth is directly linked to the consumer economy of the United States. It has become more and more accessible to shop online, and with Amazon's 'Prime' service, customers can receive their items within two days shipped to them for free. This is a huge incentive for people to buy more products, which reflects the consumer mindset of the era. But besides the fact that they have a very convenient online catalogue, why is Amazon so successful? This is where the consumer data comes in. Amazon uses the data of each of its customers to create personalized 'Recommender Systems' which recommend products to specific customers based on their purchase history and search history in an effort to increase sales. Amazon also has a product called 'Amazon Echo' which is a smart home tool, but it records and saves everything you say. Amazon then shows you ads tailored to what you have been saying to your 'Amazon Echo.' Amazon also keeps record of popular items on their website. With all of that data, Amazon finds the best-sellers and buys the products directly from the manufacturers to then sell under their own brand named 'Amazon Basics.' This directly undercuts the small businesses who wish to sell on Amazon, and such small businesses don't have much option as Amazon is by far the largest and most reliable online marketplace. This only results in Amazon getting more revenue and small businesses getting shut down. This is just one example of a negative social change created by Amazon's incredible growth. President Donald Trump has previously called Amazon a monopoly and is trying to enforce antitrust laws such as the Sherman Antitrust Act for its acquisition of Whole Foods and its multiple other acquisitions including Zappos, diapers.com, and twitch.tv.

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“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.”

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Facebook was founded at Harvard in 2004 by a college student named Mark Zuckerberg. It was initially called 'The Face Book' and was for Harvard students to meet, but it soon expanded to the entire country, and Zuckerberg changed the name to 'Facebook.' Now, Facebook has over around 1.5 billion active users and also owns Instagram, Whatsapp, OculusVR, and many other brands.

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This excerpt is from the "Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions
in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber
Incident Attribution" published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This document highlights the covert "cyber-activity" intelligence operations and overt third-party social-media "trolls" hired by the Russian Government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Such efforts were to "denigrate Hillary Clinton" and had "clear preference" for Donald Trump.

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In the 21st century, Facebook, and all other social media for that matter, has grown immensely. In the ever-growing consumer-centric economy, Americans use Facebook and Instagram as a means of consumption, be it funny videos, friends birthdays, and even news. This is where the problem arose in 2016. Although it is remarkable that Facebook is bringing people closer than ever before as they alone have reduced the degrees of separation between humans to an estimated 3.5, a company like Facebook is not doing this for charity or out of the goodness of their hearts. Facebook wants to make money, like any other corporation, so they sell your data — what you like, what you comment on, what you post, even what you search when on Facebook. Again, if you are not the customer, you are the product. A prime example of selling user data was the data scandal mentioned above. While the excerpt refers to 'social media', it really is referring to Facebook's data scandal with Russian trolls. These trolls named themselves the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The IRA created many fake accounts on Google, Facebook, and Twitter and even contacted over 100 real Americans to carry out tasks for them degrading Clinton and promoting Trump. Facebook estimated that over 126 million people saw content by the IRA or followed fake accounts made by the IRA. Needless to say, such an incident is so clearly a negative political change, and has sprung up from the democratization of consumer data in the digital world of the 21st century.

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“We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.”

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Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two P.h.D students at Stanford University. At first, Google was just a search engine, but throughout the years, it has expanded and dominated many more fields including maps with Google Maps, translation with Google Translate, email with Gmail, and a document editing suite(word processing, spreadsheets, and slides) with Google drive.

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This quote is an excerpt from Google's Privacy Policy shows Google's true intentions. This starts off quite charitable, mentioning that the purpose of data collection is the improvement of Google's services as well as to protect Google and the users. The second sentence is not so charitable. Google tries to paint this in a good light, but 'tailored content' and 'relevant search results and ads' are synonymous with selling data to larger companies and profiting off of the consumers. If you are not the customer you are the product.

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Google has not created its plethora of free services out of the kindness of their hearts. With over 40,000 searches per second and seven Google apps each with over 1 billion active users, Google is trying to collect as much data as physically possible by inserting themselves in all aspects of their users lives. For example, Google has your location data from Google Maps, your image data from Google Photos, your messaging and contact data from Gmail, your schedule data from Google Calendar, your document data on Google drive, and they have data on everything that you do on Google Chrome. And just like Amazon and Netflix, Google uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to analyze their data and train their models to give each consumer customized content such as Gmail sentence complete suggestions, Google map suggestions, and even Youtube video recommendations. In effect, Google has a detailed set of data on each of its users and it profits each time we see a customized-ad on their services. The issue with such detailed profiling is that our private data such as the content of our Gmail messages are transferred and sold with out our explicit consent, and this is exactly the issue raised at the House Judiciary Committee during the CEO's testimony.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/18UM0EmdVx39KYDOe3dYihHo_dCNFK9lffwlHWndcnU8/edit?usp=sharing