Overview:
Within surveillance capitalism, digital users provide their experiences as data to be used to modify their behavior. Data used by digital firms, to change user behavior for financial reward. Data used to be used to enhance user experience, but has become the source of profit. Not just profit, but also political power. As the data can be used to find people that need persuading. Power is held with those who hold the data. The way the data is gathered and used threatens what it means to be human, democracy, and people’s sovereignty.

Data is sold to other businesses, and rendered into behavioral predictions. The way they get user data, is through covert means. Spying on everyday lives without consent. Gathering and modifying personal data. Claimed to be anonymous, but can be used to identify the person. Digital firms claim that privacy is the cost of using the seemingly free products. Privacy violations that are enabled through legal terms of agreement. Without a way to opt out of the privacy violations, especially because society has become dependent on using digital means to communicate and engage with others. Privacy for use of products is not a legitimate choice anyone should make. Especially because the privacy violations are not actually needed to run the applications.

Dependency On The Digital Realm:
Digital interactions have become ubiquitous and familiar, but without much reflection on what these interactions mean. The digital realm created a networked world that enabled capabilities and prospects, but came with negative psychological consequences. Life has become dependent on the services that the internet provides, but to use the internet requires destruction of various human values. Cognitive dissonance occurs with the use of the digital realm, for it provides a lot of value, but at a very large personal and social cost. An illegitimate choice that has become normalized.

Applications have purposely found ways to become addictive. As people engage with them in higher frequencies, and for longer durations. Becoming a compulsion. Meant for relief, but generates anxiety. Technology has accelerated various socialization developments, become a necessity for social participation, and are used for the sake of connection. Social pressure generates a tendency to over-share.

Data, Security, And A Choice:
Earlier digital applications acknowledged the data the was being produced, with the data usage being in control of the user. Data initially was used for the user. Emphasizing the sovereignty of the individual, and places of sanctuary within private domains. Data that did not cost the customers anything, while the data enabled better experiences of products and the expansion of available products.

Data has become a tool of oppression. Individuals no longer have privacy or security with their personal information. There is a lack of accountability for data security. Data that is being used and sold for predictive analysis. Refusal to adhere to individual data use, means risking service and product functionality. Risking the safety of the individual.

The products and services provided by surveillance capitalism do not have a value exchange. Their producer-consumer reciprocities are not constructive. Those who use free products are not customers, for there is no economic exchange, nor are the users working for the firm. Unlike workers who are paid for their efforts, users of free digital products are not paid for their efforts. Users are not customers, nor the product, they are raw material used to create surplus. The products and services are created to tempt users, who then become part of the program to extractive user personal experiences for other peoples wants. The products made are meant to predict behavior. People are the source of raw-material supply of the data used to make the predictions.

Privacy violations have become explained as necessary for the free internet services. Privacy is the price for access to information and other products. Explanations that distract from the even further violations within the digital realm. A dispossession developed and refined to better able counter and transform public resistance into protection and expansion of the behavioral surplus operations. The way digital services change behavior is by the cycle of incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection.

Privacy is redistributed rather than eroded. Rights over privacy are now concentrated with digital providers. These rights are what enable surveillance capitalism’s success. Using language to hide how they are using the rights over privacy. This means the loss of individual’s sovereignty, for they do not have control over their own data.

Whether or not an individual chooses to engage with digital application, digital firms will engage with them. People will go to other people’s private homes, to engage with the digital application.

Surveillance Capitalism:
Surveillance capitalism claims the right to use human experience as a free raw material, for the purpose of behavioral data and modification. Outcomes of the data use are proprietary behavioral surplus, used to predict what the individual will do.

The competitive process with surveillance capitalism pressures the firms to continuously obtain more data, from more sources. Then use that data to modify behavior towards profitable outcomes. A digital framework that knows and shapes behavior at scale. An attempt to automate individuals, and society. What the digital firms want, is to know the individual better than they know themselves.

Surveillance capitalism does not come about due to technological inevitabilities, but because of capitalistic logic. The firms make surveillance appear inevitable, when it is actually just a means for commercial ends that favors the firms.

Surveillance capitalists exploitation of the data they gathered, is explained in terms of emancipation to sway the generated anxieties. But the processes they use to obtain the data, is hidden. They keep power through ignorance. Surveillance capitalism’s power comes through information asymmetry. They know everything about the individual, but their operations are not made know to others. They have gathered information from each individual, to use not for the individual, but for someone else.

Digital firms found ways to legitimize and legalize their incursion into user experiences. They legitimate their claims with obscure and incomprehensible terms-of-service agreements. Even reading the abusive contract would require far longer than people actually read the contract. Without accepting terms of service, would mean loss of updates for functionality and security. Accepting some apps, gives them permission to collect and modify sensitive information. Such as calling private numbers, and accessing the camera for identification purpose. Calls are recorded, and given to third-party firms to review how the voice renders into text. To improve the voice system algorithms. The recordings are claimed to be anonymous, but people are sharing very sensitive information, that can be used to identify them. Apps collude with other apps covertly. Activating an app, triggers a variety of other tracking apps.

Application creates choice architecture to elicit specific behavior. To experiment on behavior modification for profit, and without human awareness. Academic and government experiments need to comply with set rules to prevent abuses. Which includes review boards. While private digital firms go beyond what is acceptable under the rules, and are more likely to have conflicts of interest. Digital firms behavior goes beyond established law and social norms.

Legal Status:
Google has a patent for targeted advertising. That they have the rights over users’ personal information. Rights that were held by users in the original social contract. The patent made Google an active agent in data gathering. Google’s digital targeted advertising led to financial success, but was also transformed into an automated auction.

The expropriation of experience depends on the laws making sure it is legal. Changing the laws of surveillance, would make the surveillance capitalism model unsustainable. Surveillance firms fight hard prevents laws that threaten their access to free behavioral surplus.

Content distributors and publisher are under different legal systems. While publishers are liable for defamation posts, distributors are not. Applications that do not review content posted, tend to be seen as a distributor. Companies that did set standards for the content and removed posts that violated the standards, were deemed to take responsibility for the content and therefore considered a publisher. This created a no-win situation. The more a company would protect the users from malicious content, the more responsibility for the content the company would have. Either benefiting free speech or scoundrels. Section 230 was meant to resolve that contradiction, by allowing some control over content, without the risk of legal repercussions. This contradiction does not much apply to surveillance capitalism. The content providers data is now being used to render into behavioral data that leads to product sales. Section 230’s protection of intermediaries now protects the surveillance operations from examination.

Technology Leaders, And Politicians:
Politicians have chosen to attach themselves to internet providers leaders to appear as willing to make a change. But that proximity is a threat to every other internet provider. Google’s leadership’s contact with the presidency, threatened Google’s competitors. Providing technical support and taking part in the electoral cycle. With the help of the digital realm, the campaigns knew everyone who they needed to persuade, and along with their personal and private social data.

Tech industry, specifically Google, is a major contributor to political lobbying efforts. They use their efforts to prevent legislation that would impede their extraction of behavioral surplus.

Surveillance capitalism can be used by governments as well. For political purposes, rather than market ones. A forfeiture of freedom, for knowledge that is used by the state.

A technology of behavior has the potential to reject the idea of freedom. Technology that can harmonize human behavior. Giving up freedom for guaranteed outcomes. Freedom requires the individual’s to choose how to develop themselves, not behavioral modification programs.

Caveats?
The book can be difficult to read, especially because of the ideological origins of the ideas. Simplifying and misdirecting some of the ideology unto wrong targets. The author uses language in the same way the author claims the digital firms use language to persuade people to give up their privacy rights.

The focus of the book is about the wrongs of behavioral modification. But behavioral modification is not always against the individual. As the author makes the case, what makes behavioral modification acceptable is a legitimate choice made by the user. While the way behavioral modification occurs is through covert means. What is limited in this book, are practical ways to identify the covert means that firms use. Practical ways to identify the inappropriate behavioral modification.
( )

This week my company officially got into the business of surveillance. People will pay us to surveil their home and business computers to protect them from rogue computer software, from losing data resulting from defective or aging components in their computers, and from misguided management of their computers themselves.

Going forward this will be a growing and lucrative business segment because people rely on their computers to do so many important things for them, because they feel inadequate keeping up with changes in the computing environment, and because they justifiably fear cyber crime.

It doesn’t mean they like it. I sure don’t.

Being in retail business as I have for almost 25 years I have learned how to surveil myself, to protect my assets, and my employees. It is an ongoing challenge and it changes. I surveil for shoplifters, for currency and credit card counterfeiters, for daylight and after hours thieves. I surveil for dishonest employees, for honest mistakes, for poor buying decisions, and for the obsolescence of the products on my shelves. I surveil how the bank handles my money. I surveil my suppliers to prevent them from shipping me incomplete or broken goods. And I pay attention to my customers, to save them from making poor purchasing decisions.

And when I am not surveilling, I am surveying. All the time. How were my customers’ experiences? What new products are on the horizon? How can I protect my liquidity, my profitability, and lastly, my sanity.

I especially surveil myself, because I make mistakes, and because I too am growing old.

These are some of the risks of operating a business.

Then there are the people who surveil me. They include thieves looking for a weakness in my security. Government agencies to make sure I am paying the eight or ten different taxes I pay on an ongoing basis. Credit card companies surveil my transactions to make sure somebody hasn’t stolen my credit card, or that I am spending no more money than I can afford to pay back. My suppliers make sure I am paying them on time. Some manufacturers visit me in person or electronically to make sure I am representing their product lines fairly. They send me electronic training, and tests, and they regularly measure the efficiency and quality of our repair facilities. The utilities tell me when my operations (and home) are inefficient. And there are my landlords.

Finally, we surveil at home. We surveil our daughter to make sure she is doing her homework and not falling in with the wrong crowd. My wife surveils me to make sure I’m not overeating, overspending, or being overly attentive to other women. I surveil my dog Seamus just in case he poops on the neighbour’s lawn so I can pick it up before someone notices. And Seamus surveils the front window and barks whenever a neighbouring dog saunters by.

Last and not least are the gargantuan corporations who are watching what I do online. People like facebook, Google, amazon, and many, many more.

So when somebody writes a book to tell me I live in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism...I GET IT! REALLY, I GET IT!

But is it uniquely capitalist, or more generally an age of surveillance?
And if it is more general to our society, where do we go from here?

One thing for sure: it isn’t going away anytime soon.

Shoshana Zuboff concentrates her guns on Google and facebook. She’s concerned that these companies are inherently different from the companies that came before it and they set a new standard for egregious capitalism. They are companies in the prediction business, predicting human behaviour and right now largely predicting purchasing behaviour by accumulating, as she called it, “surplus behaviour,” which kinda sounds like an oxymoron.

She believes they abuse the freedoms of the marketplace to frustrate privacy, that they are built to enrich few and sidestep the traditional workplace which pays many employees fairly and creates consumers, and she argues that they are indifferent to social ills.

She argues that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t operate in this marketplace because the new knowledge capitalists know everything happening in the market.

A close reading of Andrew Carnegie’s life and legacy, perhaps John D. Rockefeller as well, could lead you to a similar conclusion, even though both men turned to philanthropy later in life. For sure, these men affected the course of capitalism.

Is this a turn away from “good” capitalism toward an inherently evil capitalism?

And if it is evil, can we create some rules for the big guys that us little guys can live with?

Let’s take a step back and look at things in context: Google’s revenue is about $25 billion, Facebook’s $17 billion. The entire US economy is about $25 trillion and the world economy upwards of $107 trillion.

Most of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is advertising. The US advertising market is upwards of $80 billion so it is fair to say these two firms command quite strong positions in this industry. If you make the argument that America’s advertising industry is too concentrated then you’d have a pretty good argument to break up these firms which combined represent about 50% of all advertising dollars in the US. By comparison, Standard Oil at its peak commanded 88% of the market for processing crude. In its first year of operation, US Steel produced 67% of steel produced the the US.

And they exhibit the classic behaviour of monopolists by dominating the markets for search and for social media on a global scale.

In the US a case for breaking up the firms traditionally would have to be made that consumers are paying too much for their services or that competitors are being kept out of the market. Maybe breaking up these firms is a good idea, maybe it isn’t, but either way the technologies they employ for gathering, and analyzing, data isn’t going away.

When I worked as an auditor, we used to gather lots of data, too, but what we eventually learned was that we could make assumptions about its meaning by sampling the information; that is, we cut down our work by only looking at some of the data. We tried to cut down on the wasted time. I sometimes wonder how much of what Google does is a total waste of time because the answers it seeks can be found in much faster time using much less data. And how much of “Big Data” is in fact a “Big Waste of Time.”

Zuboff doesn’t consider that these firms may still be just in the early stages of figuring out what they are supposed to be doing. I think about it because so much time and resources are wasted paying attention to wholly irrelevant stuff.

But we would do well to consider the affect of these companies on our freedoms and our government partially because they aren’t just national problems. They are transnational problems. What happens in China, and the extreme kind of surveillance practiced there on ethnic minorities like the Uigers, affects or will affect us here.

They are transnational because the data collection is transnational and the very same data collected for the purpose of selling advertising is probably being used to develop artificial intelligence. The fastest developer of AI whether they be Chinese companies, transnational companies like Google or Facebook, or companies directly financed by government will have a big say in who has a job in the coming years and who doesn’t.

No country on its own can hope to curb data collection and aggregation or perhaps more importantly, the control of what search results reveal on this scale any more than a country can curb money laundering, tax avoidance, or climate change without coordination between many if not all nations. Contemporary politics seems to be going in the opposite direction if Trump’s “America First,” Brexit, and Russian adventurism are any indication.

If we are divided and our attention fractured we are susceptible to the influence or real or imagined “experts.” (To firms like Facebook I think we all have ADD, attention deficit disorder...they can never get enough of our attention!) That doesn’t mean we cannot continue to make decisions affecting our government, it more likely means that the decisions we make will more commonly resemble the imperatives of those desiring more of the same, read: the status quo.

And that turns us to the question of how good is the status quo. If you believe that the universe ultimately bends toward the dilution of energy, total entropy, then the status quo is not too good. If you believe the status quo to be a teleological evolution toward a great singularity, perhaps a union with God, and a progression toward greater complexity in the universe, the status quo looks pretty good.

Business executives, in my experience, tend to be of the more optimistic latter type of people. Like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and other people who have become incredibly wealthy in a short period of time.

In the meantime, some of us have rather pedestrian concerns like the security of really private information. While convincingly arguing that there is insufficient transparency over who handles the big data and how they handle it, I think Zuboff fails to sufficiently weigh immense risk that the data will fall out of control of the aggregators and into the hands of rogue individuals.

The hacking of credit card databases is one thing, and I think it a bigger risk than the hacking of a database which tells people how I like my hotdogs dressed. People made a big deal of the Cambridge Analytica scare. In the end, those people sold bogus claims to naive political organizations. The data predicted nothing and was of no use to anybody. And it didn’t get Donald Trump elected.

Certainly big data aggregation has concrete effects on the economy. You get “free” Google searches. I get a cheaper smart TV because the data guys get first dibs on my TV watching preferences.

This book is not the best guide for the good works these technologies enable (ie crowd sourcing, scientific research, epidemiology, etc). Self-driving cars benefit by machine learning. The acceleration and reductions in the friction in electronic commerce are generally good things.

I don’t agree with Zuboff that the behavioural science behind the new data aggregation firms promotes a radical indifference to the lot of the common person. Nor do I agree that hyperscale doesn’t require competitive markets or for that matter democracy.

This has yet to be proven.

We all need participatory democracy, and more than ever on a global scale. Let’s make these damn machines work for us, not agin us. ( )

I was most interested in how personal data is located, captured, and sold. This didn’t appear until the beginning of Chapter 5. You need to know what this chapter says! It’s impossible to keep your personal information from being gathered, but there are some things that you can do to safeguard it. ( )

Audible ebook | Like amoral sales people, the commercial surveillance of customers has morphed into highly covert and silent actions which when married with sophisticated statical analysis renders a complete profile of a userships’ life. ( )

I think the ideas are must-reads. However, this is an extremely long book and it feels like she has introduced new words that she thinks should be part of a new lexicon. Instrumentarian is the one that stood out to me, but I'm pretty sure there were others. It was just so long that I don't want to go through it again to find them. Listening on audiobook was probably a mistake and I may have liked it more in print. ( )