“Surveillance Capitalism” is a term coined by Harvard Business professor Dr. Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 masterpiece “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power”. It is defined as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales” and “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification.” Largely unregulated in most countries, it offers an Orwellian-nightmare dystopian future that digitizes every aspect of the human experience for the financial benefit of Surveillance Capitalists, and it is on a direct “collision course with Democracy”.
The future is now…but it is not friendly.
While privacy protection receives a great deal of lip service today, the real threat level is little understood outside Silicon Valley. The Devil likes the shadows, and surveillance capitalists are highly secretive regarding their Harpocratic methodologies. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt referred to a “hiding strategy”. Their dark proprietary algorithmic arts are practiced behind closed doors; disguised by the shiny new toys that delight unsuspecting users, cloaked in neoliberal rhetoric, and protected from government regulation by virtually unlimited lobbying budgets which influence legislators in their favour. Their insidious extraction architectures are closely guarded corporate secrets within the industry. As founding Google CEO Larry Page said “Old institutions like the law and so on aren't keeping up with the rate of change that we've caused through technology…”
Google pioneered surveillance capitalism. It's business model, predicated upon the harvesting of “digital exhaust” to package and sell predictive behavioural products, has become the default standard for most internet companies today. Everyone is doing it. Google discovered a way to capitalize user interactions into surplus data for the creation of a new type of product to sell to its real customers…advertisers. These products are known as “predictive products”, and are the economic backbone of internet companies.
In 2010 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unilaterally declared the end of privacy as a social norm “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time (Guardian)”.
A more honest statement would have been, “People have been subjected, through dependency, to a psychological numbing which has habituated them to the rampant privacy invasion which permeates every single digital interaction today.” User Profile Information (UPI) is the raw material of surveillance capitalism.
Most users agree blindly to Terms and Conditions (74% of users, according to a recent University of London study), assuming that they refer only to the personal information that is consciously shared during the interaction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Data extraction algorithms are in fact mining much more deeply into our being. As Google Chief Economist Hal Varian said in 2002, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” The same study showed that purchasers of a single Nest Thermostat (manufactured by Google holding company Alphabet) were effectively entering unseen into one thousand different contracts within the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps. This is referred to within the industry as “click wrap”, because users get wrapped in unknown multiple agreements with one click.
According to Zuboff, Google was searching for ways to increase revenues in response to investor anxiety. Opportunity knocked in 2002. The birth of surveillance capitalism came by accident one morning in April as a result of query spikes overnight regarding 1970's sitcom character Carol Brady. Analysis showed that the spikes occurred at forty-eight minutes after the hour in five successive time zones, corresponding with the question “What was Carol Brady's maiden name?” on the television show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” It was the moment when Google realized the commercial potential in mining personal data. Behavioural surplus had been discovered. In perhaps the understatement of the century, an unnamed Google executive was quoted in a November 2002 NYT article, “There is tremendous opportunity with this data.” In one quantum leap, Google was in a new business. Users were now the raw material for the manufacture of lucrative predictive products which could target advertising to consumers. Surveillance capitalism was born; the unplanned love-child of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
In “The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives”, authors Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google observe “The online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it's the world's largest ungoverned space.”
Using proprietary analytics, surveillance capitalism constructs detailed stories about each user based upon the “digital breadcrumbs” left in the wake of every online interaction. Through the collection and analysis of meta-data created with each individual click, our thoughts, feelings, interests and habits are accurately measured and stored as User Profile Information (UPI). This allows targeting of user-specific advertising at just the right moment to optimize effectiveness, thereby eliminating the costly voodoo guesswork that drove traditional advertising.
The industry is now moving into next generation technology, behavioural modification products. Your insurance rate increases if your vehicle GPS tells your insurance company that you drive too fast or park in high risk areas, your health insurance increases if your fitness app detects a sedentary lifestyle or a digestible sensor alerts to an unprescribed diet, or your vehicle is shutdown and it's GPS location sent to a repo company for pickup if you miss a loan payment. This is not dark science fiction. It is reality…now.
The internet of things (IoT) imagines a world where everything is connected digitally. Cisco Kinetic operates some 120 “smart cities” which use a cloud-based platform to extract data from customers. In 2017 Prime Minister Trudeau announced that Toronto would be the test city for Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs “Google City” development, which will harvest data through WiFi kiosks (even if you are not using WiFi), environmental sensors and other devices.
Google has developed internet-enabled fabrics designed to monitor biometrics, claiming that it “aims to bring inductive yarns to every garment and fabric on earth”, and has already partnered with Levi Strauss to produce “interactive denim”. “Smart Skin”, described as “the ultimate sensing tool”, now allows monitoring of multiple parameters in the inconspicuous guise of a sticker, applied anywhere that data extraction is sought.
Surveillance capitalism has also mutated into the political sphere, with connections to the intelligence community. As far back as 1997, then Director George Tenet stated “The CIA needs to swim in the Valley.” In the days following 9/11 the CIA began “militarization of the world wide web” according to former Director Michael Hayden. Author David Lyon wrote that 9/11 resulted in “socially negative consequences that hitherto were the stuff of repressive regimes and dystopian novels…”
Google is in bed with the CIA; jointly funding In-Q-Tel and Keyhole, the CIA Intelink Management Office, and has jointly invested in web monitoring start-up Recorded Future.
During the 2016 election cycle, the Trump campaign employed one hundred staff dedicated to social media micro-targeting. Look what happened.
As Zuboff puts it, “Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides We The People”.