Surveillance Capitalism

Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," that reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data.

We think that the only personal information the companies have about us is what we’ve given them and we think we can exert some control over what we give them. However, the information that we provide is the least amount of information that they collect about us.

Thanks to their navigation and search engine Google knows where we are all the time and what we think. Facebook knows our hobbies, preferences, friends, because they retrieve a lot of information from the digital traces we leave behind unwittingly.

Spelling errors in your search terms, which color buttons you prefer, how fast you type, how fast you drive…

Companies say that they collect data to improve their service which is partially correct. But even more of it is analyzed to train what they call models, patterns of human behavior. So once they have big training models, they can see how people with these characteristics typically behave over time. That allows the companies to fit your data right into that arc and to predict what you're likely to do not only now but soon and later.Zuboff calls this “behavioral surplus”. Once they have the behavioral surplus, the comprehensive behavioral data, of hundreds of millions of people, it gets easier to predict the Preferences of specific groups.

For example, they may predict the kind of food you're in the mood for at the moment and sell that prediction to their business customers in the in the restaurant business. The business will send you a very quick ad “We know you're in the mood for a delicious pasta dish tonight”, “We can invite you to our restaurant. Here's a discount coupon” etc. This is being conducted at a level that is not accessible to us. Or, for example, facial recognition software might be sold to a Chinese company that supports the oppression of the Uyghurs in China or that helps track down advocates of democracy in Hong Kong. Our precious family photos might be used by Facebook to facilitate authoritarian regimes and our privacy is guaranteed. Because it's not our faces that are sold; it’s the residual data scraped off them.

Now voices are what they are after just like the faces. “Hey Google, open up a music”, “Hey Google, set an alarm for 7.30”… They obfuscate, misdirect, and engineer our ignorance with mechanisms and methods that are undetectable and indecipherable. There's two legal scholar said there at the University of London. They analyzed the privacy policy how we give our consent to these devices. So they analyzed these documents for one nest thermostat. What happens is the thermostat? It collects data, it sends those data to third parties and those third parties send data to third parties. No company takes responsibility for what the third parties that it's sending your data to may do with your data.

Google's free mobile operating system Android means Google holds the key to almost 90% of the world's smartphones in order to obtain as much data as possible from all these cell phones. Google experimented with Network balloons in those parts of the world where mobile internet is not available. Facebook ,not to be outdone, flew network drones over growing markets and offered free internet in combination with the Facebook app. Facebook is happy to take our data but not prepared to share information on how the company works. Companies figure out how to target your fears, angers, happiness and with those targets, they trigger those emotions. They manipulate you into clicking on a website, joining a group, telling you what kind of things to read, telling you what kind of people to hang out, telling them who to vote for.

We use technology. We have to. But it shouldn’t get to the point where it uses us and controls us. That's the bottom line of it. There's a lot that the digital brings to our lives. We deserve to have technology but we deserve to have it without paying the price of surveillance capitalism.

21st century citizens should not have to make a choice of either essentially, going analog or living in a world where our self-determination, our privacy are destroyed for the sake of this market logic. The wrong people in charge of our government and they look over their shoulders at the rich control.

Most of the data is in the shadow operation and the shadow operation is never coming to use. We will never get those data that they own, that they took it from our lives. They took it from our private experience without our permission. They analyzed the data. They made it into products. They sold the products and they took the profit, the illegitimate profit because they took it at the beginning without asking, without our knowledge, recall by passing our awareness.

Turkmen & Ranpura