Data Sovereignty, TickTock and The Cold War
Once seen as only a consideration for a government organisation, data sovereignty must now be a consideration for all. If you use a web analytics tool, where does that data get stored, and who owns it? It’s information about your customers and their online experience on your website, but do you actually own that data? If you choose to move tools, can you export it in order to import it into another tool? If your customers ask for their data to be deleted, can you do this easily and cost-effectively?
One of the main reasons why companies switch from free web analytics tools like Google Analytics to paid alternatives like Matomo is the ability to store their data on their own servers within their own country. This is particularly important because there is an increasing concern about the potential risk of sending customer data to offshore data centres in foreign countries without realising it.
Although it’s only recently that Google Analytics has been cross-examined due to GDPR legislation in Austria and other European countries, China banned Google Analytics as early as 2015 as part of the Great Chinese Firewall.
What about what tools we choose to use to market to our customers and the data we provide to those vendors in order to target them? Most people are now aware of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. During the 2010s, a British consulting firm named Cambridge Analytica collected personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users without their consent. The primary purpose of this data collection was for political advertising. The data was obtained through an app known as ‘This Is Your Digital Life’, which was developed in 2013 by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company, Global Science Research.
An app everyone is familiar with is TikTok, but are you aware of who actually owns TikTok? For brands, this could be considered a great place to advertise, but its connections to China are clear. TikTok, also known in China as Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The owners claim that TikTok is an entirely separate, internationalised version of Douyin. According to Wikipedia, TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but supposedly no access to each other’s content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available.
In May 2021, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, reportedly ended its contract with Alibaba Cloud and decided to host its servers on Amazon Web Service and Oracle Corporation servers. It isn’t clear how much user data is stored on each server or where the company stores its Chinese user data.
At the time of writing this book, both the UK and the USA have started banning government employees from using TikTok company devices. So, it’s clear that those governments and their advisers are not convinced by the claim of data sovereignty and separated ownership of data. China, of course, isn’t happy about this but is probably not surprised after having initiated their own similar, more far reaching bans as part of the Great Firewall.
Whatever your company decides, there are serious ethical and legal considerations that warrant a close look at every tool in your stack before it’s approved, as well as regular review, and if your entire marketing strategy is oriented around TickTok right now, you would surely be getting nervous. As we saw with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this is not tinfoil-hat conspiracy thinking any more.
Across the world, governments are seriously worried about the ability of big tech and social media corporations to enable the weaponising of data and the creation of highly targeted advertising for political gain. As ethical marketers, analysts, and consumers ourselves, so should we be.
