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Surveillance Capitalism: Tech Titans Compromising Privacy to Maximize Profits
The collection and commodification of personal data by big tech companies and used to make a profit is known as ‘surveillance capitalism‘. It’s a term that was first coined in the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff.
Zuboff told PBS news that “Surveillance capitalism was a breakthrough idea where it was discovered that it was possible to secretly capture private human experience and treat it as free raw material for the translation into behavioral data… They have established a new kind of marketplace where they sell these behavioral predictions. These are predictions of our future behavior, and I call these markets, as you have noted, humans` future markets, because now what has happened is our private experience has been commodified in the form of this behavioral data.”
Some people worry that surveillance capitalism is causing us to lose our right to anonymity and is eroding our civil and privacy rights.
Zuboff said “Surveillance capitalists sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do. Targeted adverts, yes, but also businesses want to know whether to sell us a mortgage, insurance, what to charge us, do we drive safely? They want to know the maximum they can extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we will behave in order to know how to best intervene in our behaviour.”
John Naughton, professor at the Open University, wrote in the Guardian that “digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatized counterpart. This is intolerable.”
