The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff rocked Silicon Valley and beyond. Shoshana is Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Shoshana has delivered a critically important book not to be missed. This is a “once in a decade book” that digs deep into digital surveillance by Google and Facebook.
So, before you ask about recent US Senate votes to continue warrantless access to your internet search and browser history, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are harvesting just about all of your personal data.
So, the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ is new for many who only recently see this term added to our societal lexicon. The ability for Google and Facebook to simply take your data, mash it up, and sell it (without your knowledge) may indeed surprise many. But the depth of their reach Shoshana reveals may shock you.
You may not yet realize how Google and Facebook have already tuned their artificial intelligence platforms to data mining you even deeper than you may realize. Actually, think you with nothing to hide? Think again.
Google and Facebook lead in data harvesting
There is a common understanding that ‘free’ is just that. A ‘free’ email account and ‘free’ social media platforms? Nothing short of a lie. And the misdirection that ‘you become the product’ is no longer accurate. Shoshana refocuses this misdirection to convey Google and Facebook have so much of your private data, they now simply harvest your daily input toward their behavioral capitalism.
For Google this data mining includes all products and services including the acquired Nest thermostat. This is not new by the way. The LA Times reported back in May 2008 a plan by Charter to track customer web habits. These messages remind me of 2009’s The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain.
How Google Maps harvested your personal data
Today the question is not how, but rather how much you use and rely upon Google Maps. When Google’s StreetView cars drove past your house (and mine) taking photographs — their cars had surveillance tools that downloaded your home’s WiFi payload data.
Wait, what? Oh yes, they did.
As a result, Attorneys General from 38 states sued Google. 12 other countries, mainly from Europe also sued.
So, just how sensitive was the data collected by Maps? Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that StreetView’s data harvesting included:
names telephone numbers credit card information passwords (Yes Google harvested your passwords) e-mails (full text) chat transcripts dating site data pornography site data browsing behavior medical data location data
In addition, Shoshana reveals how Google, forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data” the personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. In some instances your entire email message, URLs and passwords were harvested.
John Hanke, Vice President for Google Maps previously directed Keyhole, a CIA-satellite mapping company. After Google purchased Keyhole, Hanke directed the upgrade of Google Earth. The full 25 page legal filing for your reading pleasure: In the Matter of Google, Inc.: Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture, File No.: EB-10-IH-4055, NAL/Acct. No.: 201232080020, FRNs: 0010119691, 0014720239, Federal Communications Commission, April 13, 2012, 12–13.
Yes, your mattress, and thermostat does track you
Surveillance Capitalism documents how data collection of your private life has been hyperextended by the Internet of Things (IoT). By chance, do you own a Sleep Number bed? did you know these beds have microphones as just one of their many sensors that are collecting data about you.
Wait…what? Yes, a microphone sensor has certainly been stitched into their mattress. Their privacy statement is truly surveillance based:
“You, a Child, and any person that uses the Bed slept, such as that person’s movement, positions, respiration, and heart rate while sleeping.” It also collects all the audio signals in your bedroom.” As with most policies, customers are advised that the company can “share” or “exploit” personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel the Services and/or your Sleep Number account or User Profiles(s). Customers are warned that no data transmission or storage “can be guaranteed to be 100% secure” and that it does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications.”
Yes that is correct, you cannot opt-out of their surveillance. Yet if you think this is no big deal, ask a divorce lawyer. Still concerned about the government’s warrantless tracking of your browser cookies?
Shoshana points to the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners that map your house and upload the data when they sweep up…pun intended. Why? Roomba sells the floor plan of your house to third parties without your knowledge or consent. Just look to your mailbox for some very, very accurately targeted ads.
The corporate hard shift to surveillance capitalism is not new. Mattel, the toy company hired a Google executive Margaret Georgiadis to lead the toy maker into surveillance capitalism data harvesting and new profits. However Margo departed Mattel to run the consumer genomics company Ancestry.
Whatever happened to privacy?
Privacy was the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. When something is private to a person, it usually means that something is inherently special or sensitive to them.
Good definition and understanding for everyone. Privacy was also the option to have secrecy, to “conceal information about themselves that others might use to their disadvantage.” Yet surveillance technologies have created new methods to gather your private information.
The need for privacy is something we all want. At specific times it is even more important, like the privacy between you and your medical doctor.
In conclusion, read this book to fully understand the need for privacy legislation. My comments above are just the tip of the surveillance iceberg. One of the best books I have read in many years.
Associated Press:
Meet the scholar who diagnosed ‘surveillance capitalism’
Wall Street Journal:
‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ Review: The New Big Brother
Asharq Al-Awsat:
You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation