Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance & Data Collection

Free services come at a cost, your personal data. You may say that you have “nothing to hide”, that you enjoy personalized ads, or personalized services. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that those statements are “... a profound misconception.”

Shoshana Zuboff says the data that Google, or Facebook collects from you isn't what's dangerous. It's what those companies can do with that data. They use the data you think you give them, along with what she calls residual data, like your traveling speed, and your tone of voice, and in turn, use that information to feed into their algorithms and models that can accurately predict your behavior, emotions, buying habits among other things.

Zuboff says that the pictures you post onto Facebook can be used to train facial recognition models that can easily and more accurately track people. These algorithms can then be sold to authoritarian governments like China, and in turn track people that are being oppressed like the Uighur muslims.

Facebook also experimented with subliminal messages on their social media apps to change real world actions and behavior. Their study found that online cues can change real world behaviors without the user knowing it is happening at all. This methodology was used by Cambridge analytica to influence the way people felt, and what they saw on social media, which ultimately led users to be manipulated in the way they voted during the 2016 Presidential election.

Greed and easy profits is what is driving surveillance capitalism. The world famous Pokemon Go app that took the world by storm in 2016, was actually a marketing ploy developed by Google. It made players travel to certain businesses and locations to collect pokemon. Companies like Starbucks and McDonalds paid to have those Pokemons at their location, which boosted their profits. It was never about a cute little game, it was always about money.