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1-Page Summary of The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism
Overview
After the events of September 11, 2001, efforts to establish online privacy laws were put aside. Nowadays, there are very few laws that protect your personal data from being collected and sold to advertisers. This information includes browsing history, phone numbers, email addresses, location history and even a psychological profile based on your social media accounts. This data is becoming more specific as advanced “smart” devices enter the market and diminish the amount of space not being monitored for behavioral data.
If you use the Internet, you are engaging with surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalists take your data and sell it to advertisers. They track everything from location to search history to contacts and more. The list goes on and on because they know how often you charge your phone or when you go to sleep. This information is then used for behavioral trends that help advertisers better target customers.
Many books that criticize surveillance capitalism are still helping to normalize it by suggesting that people should turn off their devices and spend less time on social media. Shoshana Zuboff, however, hopes we can find a way for better privacy laws in the digital sphere.
In this article, you’ll learn about how many cookies your computer collects when visiting the most popular websites. You’ll also find out how behaviorism is guiding business practices today and why it’s controversial. Lastly, you’ll read about how the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to surveillance capitalism in America.
Big Idea #1: In surveillance capitalism, all aspects of the human experience are being monetized.
Do you know to what extent businesses are monitoring and selling your movements, speech, actions, experiences and behaviors? Few of us do. These companies are trying to keep it that way.
In surveillance capitalism, everything we do is collected and sold to businesses.
Personal data collected can help businesses advertise better. For example, if you’re close to a McDonald’s, they’ll show you an ad for a Big Mac.
AI can also help with predictive products. For example, Amazon’s Alexa is a virtual assistant that helps people buy things online and collect data about their purchases.
Google was the first to recognize that people’s personal data could be used for business purposes. Google was able to use this new information and turn its business around from losing money to making a lot of money in just four years.
Facebook is the second largest site in terms of data collection. A study found that 90% of websites leak personal information to an average of nine outside domains where this info is collected and used for commercial purposes. Of these sites, 78% send info to Google-owned domains and 34% send it to Facebook-owned domains.
Facebook is like Google in that it sells targeted ads to advertisers. In 2012, Facebook added a new tracking policy to its terms of service agreement that few people read because it was too long. Surveillance capitalism is the term for this kind of tactic.
Research shows that even when you’re not using your phone, it’s still tracking what you do. For example, many apps sold for Android phones contain trackers that leak personal information. Google Android phones themselves also provide a constant stream of location and behavior data.
How did we get to the point where using digital products means giving up our privacy? We’ll examine this in more detail later, but first let’s look at how surveillance capitalism came about.
