Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as \u201ca new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales\u2026\u201d It is a profound book, building its judgments regarding surveillance on foundations of fundamental, timeless societal issues: the individual versus the collective, the right to sanctuary, the right to one\u2019s future, and the difficulties posed by power asymmetries between large corporations and the consumer-public.<\/p>\n
Surveillance capitalism is enabled, and conducted, by the \u201cbig four\u201d (Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, expanded to the \u201cbig five,\u201d to include Microsoft), and technology companies that have created digital platforms for communications, including market transactions. Zuboff credits Google with creating data scraping from consumer transactions, made possible by the invention of browser \u201ccookies\u201d by an engineer at Netscape.<\/p>\n
Most of us see Big Tech companies\u2019 surveillance as merely a privacy issue. Perhaps we are comfortable with a na\u00efve view we have \u201cnothing to hide\u201d or are happy with the trade-off that our web searches are free on this wonderful thing called the internet. A search for golf equipment results in a machine placing us among \u201cpeople who golf.\u201d Our life is made easier because we now see ads for golf gear, but not tennis gear. What could be wrong with that?<\/p>\n
For starters, digital surveillance is now everywhere and becoming more intrusive. For example, \u201cwearable tech\u201d can help diagnose and control the spread of COVID-19. New sensors will measure multiple body functions and proximity to others, enabling social distance monitoring and contact tracing. This data will be permanently stored. It will be collated with location data, product searches and receipts, creating thousands of data points generated by our functions and activities. Algorithms will sort, categorize, predict behavior and, ultimately, influence our behavior to accomplish the ends desired by \u201cadvertisers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who Owns Your Information?<\/strong> Behavioral Futures Markets<\/strong> It can only get worse: Greater predictability means greater \u201cefficiency\u201d of marketing dollars. Achieving greater predictability is accomplished by ever-larger files of data collated through ever more sophisticated predictive algorithms. And prediction can lead to behavioral influence or control. We may see a purveyor of golf gear as benign, but a political \u201cinfluencer\u201d may not be. Facebook-Cambridge Analytica provides a cogent example. Data collection and modeling by a Facebook client led to the identification of \u201cpersuadables.\u201d Cambridge Analytica allegedly implemented its models of prediction and control by developing the \u201cDo So\u201d campaign on behalf of protagonists in the 2015 general elections in Trinidad and Tobago.<\/p>\n Another issue is the explosion of disinformation. Zuboff shows how this, too, has its roots in the digital platforms\u2019 algorithmic processing of user data. Surveillance collection and prediction have no dependency on truth or fact. User \u201cclick-through\u201d rates, \u201clikes\u201d and \u201cretweets\u201d are generated by disinformation just as easily as by truthful or factual information. The algorithms\u2019 predictive success is just as effective, regardless of the quality of the content under circulation. Those who would sow disinformation to harm our society know this. Nonetheless, the imperative surveillance grinds on, sorting and collating users for targeting, fertile for sensational reactions, be they based on fact or fiction.<\/p>\n Regarding the massive assembly of a dossier on every member of our population, Zuboff asks, \u201cWho knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?\u201d We would recoil instantly if the answers given to these questions were, \u201cThe government knows. The government decides it is entitled to decide, and the government does indeed decide,\u201d resonating in George Orwell\u2019s dystopian 1984. But because this surveillance is conducted by \u201csuccessful\u201d companies led by \u201cfarsighted, prosperous geniuses,\u201d we are blind to the outrage and violation of our rights. Zuboff\u2019s book removes the blind spot. She quotes Thomas Paine\u2019s The Rights of Man, \u201ca body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n Regulatory Approaches<\/strong> U.S. law currently does not offer an answer, but it does not have to be so. Tim Wu, who is a leading thinker about new models of antitrust and who authored The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, suggests that privacy laws are an inadequate approach. Wu urges that the U.S. Congress pass anti-surveillance laws, which prohibit the \u201cgratuitous surveillance and the reckless accumulation of personalized data \u2026 by allowing only the collection of data necessary to the task at hand \u2026 and after collecting data, firms would be forced … to get rid of it, or fully anonymize the rest of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Zuboff writes, \u201cWhat is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one\u2019s own life and authorship of one\u2019s own experience … the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will.\u201d The book will be invaluable to anyone seeking to sort out Big Tech issues: privacy, antitrust and the explosion of political disinformation.<\/p>\n By raising the alarm, Shoshana Zuboff invites us to consider, engage and debate the economic forms and institutions we are currently developing and their consequences. As servant leaders, we are challenged to address the problems that Zuboff identifies. Robert Reich, author of The Work of Nations, has differentiated knowledge workers, whom he calls \u201csymbolic analysts,\u201d as problem identifiers and problem solvers; and \u201cstrategic brokers\u201d who connect problem identifiers with problem solvers. Having identified the problem, Zuboff invites us to fashion solutions to the problems she identifies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new book explores how corporate digital surveillance affects our lives. Shoshana Zuboff\u2019sThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019), honored by The Financial Times and McKinsey as a short list Best Business Book of the Year 2019, has been placed by some in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4550,"featured_media":26,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-spring-2021","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4550"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/inthelead\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Zuboff identifies the real customers of the surveillance companies as the advertisers and other companies that utilize the data created in the course of the transactions by the users \u2014 we who think of ourselves as the \u201ccustomers\u201d of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other digital platforms. Indeed, each of these companies creates \u201cvalue added\u201d for the users who engage in the transactions, giving rise to our scraped data: with Google, it is searches; with Facebook, it is facilitated social connections; Amazon, purchases shipped to our homes or steamed videos; and so on. Zuboff illustrates how Big Tech companies have boldly laid claim to the behavioral data of our everyday lives. She outlines several stages and tactics to cast light on these companies\u2019 tactics, including dispossessing users of their data, habituating users to constant data extraction, deflecting objections and lobbying extensively to preserve their business model. At the heart of this issue is, who owns your information? Big Tech has laid claim to the data by arguing that because they collect, aggregate and analyze our data, they own it.<\/p>\n
\nSurveillance capitalism originated in a virtuous cycle, the use of data for product and service improvement and the personalization and customization of user experience. These are fundamental principles taught in business schools. Google added experimentation into its data collection and created predictive models of behavior. This scraped data has been used to create what Zuboff identifies as \u201cbehavioral futures markets.\u201d The digital companies\u2019 machines do not care who buys the prediction product.<\/p>\n
\nRegulators in the United States are now addressing the role of the \u201cbig four\u201d in terms of new approaches to antitrust. Google has been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of antitrust law. And the CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (Google\u2019s parent) are currently undergoing congressional investigation. Regulators in the European Union are ahead of the U.S. in terms of addressing privacy concerns and have recognized and protected the \u201cright to be forgotten.\u201d The right to be forgotten implies that we own, or co-own, our scraped data and can exert some control over it. Europe\u2019s EU General Data Protection Regulation, grounded in the right to privacy recognized in the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, maintains that people own their information, and it creates obligations and limitations on the part of the agencies who collect and use individuals\u2019 personal data, and protects its security.<\/p>\n