Surveillance Capitalism

“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experiences as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied for service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

It separates society into two parts: The Watcher and the Watched.

Surveillance capitalism asserts that surveillance is the business model of the internet The capitalist market motivates companies to collect more and more data in order to grow even larger, make more revenue, etc. Simply asking corporations to stop or cut surveillance is akin to asking a human to stop drinking water. Corporations have been built upon a system where they need surveillance in order to survive.

History

Shoshanna Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff is credited as coining the term “surveillance capitalism” in 2014 and has since written an entire book on the subject, entitled The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. In it, she explains surveillance capitalism as the spawn of capitalism and technology, motivated by social logic that corporations always need more money and growth.

Google

Google is one of the first and largest companies to so clearly follow the rules of surveillance capitalism. It’s no longer a surprise that Google captures and saves current location, location history, web and app activity emails, purchases, voice recordings, etc as most of these data points are available in Google’s My Activity dashboard. But there’s little transparency in exactly what Google is doing with this hoard of data and little room to opt out of the data collection besides abandoning Google altogether.

In 2016, Pokemon Go, made by Google, pushed and prodded its users, herding them, “to the McDonald’s, Starbucks, and local pizza joints that were paying them for “footfall,” in exactly the same way that online advertisers pay for ‘click through’ to their websites.” This was unbeknownst to players, who most likely thought they were just playing a game with themselves or a group of friends. Little did they realize how much data they were sending to Google, but how Google was attempting to use that data as an advertisement under the guise of good and clean fun.

Facebook

As a social media site, Facebook brand’s itself as being a free platform to connect with friends, family, and loved ones. But this is a narrow view of what the company does as a whole. Since users don’t pay for the platform, Facebook turns a profit from targeted ads. The targeting takes process by collecting where users spend their time on the site, what posts they click on, and who they interact with. But the troubling part of this surveillance is that Facebook also tracks internet users across the internet even if they’re logged out of Facebook or don’t have an account.

Ethical Issues

Privacy Concerns

As default people don’t have privacy or aren’t aware of their level of privacy Opaque technology

Freedom of Choice

Users' choices are manipulated by the interests of private corporations. This is partially because oftentimes, users have no option to correct data, remove their data, or say “no” to having it collected in the first place.

Democracy

In this contemporary age of digital technology, Information and data is power! Watchers have far more power than the watched because of the sheer amount of information and data they have on anyone and everyone. There exists such little regulation on Watchers, they go roughty unchecked and are allowed to operate on a policy of “act now, apologize later”.

See Also

• Surveillance technologies
• Technological Determinism
• Facebook Privacy Policy
• Data Mining and Manipulation