
The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’
Surveillance isn’t just imposed on people: Many of us buy into it willingly.
The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’ Read MoreSurveillance 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“
Surveillance isn’t just imposed on people: Many of us buy into it willingly.
The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’ Read MoreDark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests.
Dark Patterns: Past, Present, and Future. The evolution of tricky user interfaces. Read MoreeBook surveillance is potentially part of a larger trend in which data collection that would be illegal if performed by a state actor has become a common business practice of a private actor.
Reading in the Panopticon: Your Kindle May Be Spying on You, But You Can’t Be Sure Read MoreCurrent learning analytics practices may be inconsistent with higher education institutions’ fiduciary responsibilities. Institutional interests and student interests are not identical, and we should not assume they align.
The Temptation of Data-Enabled Surveillance Read MoreAdministrators say installing listening devices like Alexa in student bedrooms and hallways could help lower dropout rates. Not everyone agrees.
Should colleges really be putting smart speakers in dorms? Read MoreDirected by: Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim
Writing Credits: Karim Amer, Erin Barnett & Pedro Kos
Worldwide release by Netflix July 24, 2019
“Explore how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The Great Hack Read More