Opinion | The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age

One of the tragic ironies of the digital age is this: Despite the fact that low-income Americans have experienced a long history of disproportionate surveillance, their unique privacy and security concerns are rarely visible in Washington and Silicon Valley. As my colleague Michele Gilman has noted, the poor often bear the burden of both ends of the spectrum of privacy harms; they are subjected to greater suspicion and monitoring when they apply for government benefits and live in heavily policed neighborhoods, but they can also lose out on education and job opportunities when their online profiles and employment histories aren’t visible (or curated) enough.

The poor experience these two extremes — hypervisibility and invisibility — while often lacking the agency or resources to challenge unfair outcomes. For instance, they may be unfairly targeted by predictive policing tools designed with biased training data or unfairly excluded from hiring algorithms that scour social media networks to make determinations about potential candidates. In this increasingly complex ecosystem of “networked privacy harms,” one-size-fits-all privacy solutions will not serve all communities equally. Efforts to create a more ethical technology sector must take the unique experiences of vulnerable and marginalized users into account.

I led Pew Research Center’s research on understanding how Americans’ attitudes toward privacy were affected by Edward Snowden’s leak of documents about widespread government surveillance by the National Security Agency. Through surveys and focus group interviews, I started to see that part of the untold story in the research and policy community was the way in which low-income communities experience privacy-related harms differently.

What we found in a nationally representative survey of 3,000 American adults was striking. Not only did Americans with lower levels of income and education have fewer technology resources and lower levels of confidence in their ability to protect their digital data, but they also expressed heightened sensitivities about a range of overlapping offline privacy and security harms. This helped to illustrate a critical dimension of digital inequality that is often overlooked; the poor must navigate a matrix of privacy and security vulnerabilities in their daily lives — any of which could dramatically upend their financial, professional or social well-being. For example, when someone who is living paycheck to paycheck falls victim to an online fraud or loses the ability to use his or her smartphone after it gets hacked, the cascade of repercussions can be devastating.