Tag: Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance Capitalism is an economic system centered around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. Since personal data can be commodified it has become one of the most valuable resources on earth. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google’s AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.

Increased data collection may have various advantages for individuals and society such as self-optimization (Quantified Self), societal optimizations (such as by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, collecting and processing data in the context of capitalism’s core profit-making motive might present a danger to human liberty, autonomy and wellbeing. Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing. This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.—Wikipedia, “Surveillance capitalism”

The term as used in Internet Salmagundi is as coined by and described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism. (The Wikipedia definition is a handy encapsulation of Zuboff’s book for my  purposes here.)

Zuboff defines “surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later. It was Google that first learned how to capture surplus behavioral data, more than what they needed for services, and used it to compute prediction products that they could sell to their business customers, in this case advertisers. But I argue that surveillance capitalism is no more restricted to that initial context than, for example, mass production was restricted to the fabrication of Model T’s.”
—Harvard Gazette, “High tech is watching you“