The Age of Surveillance Capitalism summary

Introduction

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Human experience is turned into behavioral data and commercial prediction, threatening privacy, autonomy, and democracy. Do you know how much of your movements and behaviors are processed and sold by companies like Google and Facebook? Few of us do, and that is exactly how the purveyors of surveillance capitalism prefer it.

Surveillance capitalism turns aspects of human experience into data that businesses can use for profit. Personal data first helps businesses target their advertising more precisely. Are you getting close to a McDonald's? You might suddenly receive an ad for a Big Mac, but behavioral data can also help create predictive products, including virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa.

These products can then collect even more profitable data. Google pioneered surveillance capitalism and remains one of its leading practitioners. Other companies soon recognized the enormous value of this new market for personal data. Google began using behavioral data to improve targeted advertising.

Within four years, the company saw revenue increase by 3,590 percent. Facebook was among the first companies to follow Google's example. It also became Google's closest rival in the sheer amount of accumulated personal data. A 2015 University of Pennsylvania study examined the top one million most popular websites.

Researchers found that 90 percent leaked personal data to an average of nine outside domains. This information could then be tracked and used for commercial purposes. 78 percent of those outside domains were owned by Google. 34 percent were owned by Facebook, like Google.

Facebook provides advertisers with targeting data. This can include email addresses, contact information, phone numbers, and website visits from across the Internet. In 2012, Facebook mentioned a new tracking policy within a lengthy terms of service agreement. Few people were likely to read every word.

Such difficult contracts illustrate a recurring surveillance capitalism tactic. Tracking is not limited to Internet browsing. Studies have found that many apps for Google Android devices contain trackers. These can leak personal information even when the apps are not actively being used.

Google Android devices themselves can also provide continuous streams of location and behavioral data. So how did aggressive digital monitoring become such a normal part of everyday life? To understand surveillance capitalism, we first need to understand the economic environment that allowed it to emerge.

deregulation creates fertile ground

Deregulation creates fertile ground. The story of surveillance capitalism is modern, but its roots reach back several decades. During the 1970s and 1980s, the rules surrounding capitalism underwent major changes. These changes loosened regulations and helped create conditions favorable to surveillance capitalism.

Before the 1970s, capitalism operated alongside protections, sometimes described through Karl Polanyi's double movement. These laws and policies were intended to protect society from capitalism's destructive tendencies. Polanyi argued that unchecked markets could threaten labor, land, and money. The double movement provided institutions capable of restraining those forces.

Two influential economists challenged this approach during the 1970s. They were Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and American economist Milton Friedman. Both promoted a self-regulating free market with fewer laws and restrictions. They argued that regulations limited the potential of capitalist enterprise.

Hayek and Friedman both received Nobel Prizes in economics. Their growing influence helped free market ideas spread throughout governments and institutions. In the United States, regulations were dismantled under Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan. In Europe, free market capitalism was promoted as an alternative to communism and totalitarianism.

Meanwhile, social and economic inequality grew dramatically in subsequent decades. Unprecedented amounts of wealth moved toward the highest income brackets. In 2016, an International Monetary Fund report warned that inequality could threaten economic stability. Surveillance capitalism flourished within this increasingly permissive corporate environment.

Thomas Edison once recognized that capitalism's principles can eventually become society's principles. When successful companies behave a certain way, their behavior can begin to appear legitimate simply because it succeeds. If surveillance capitalism succeeds economically, its practices can similarly appear natural or justified. That assumption allows extraordinary forms of data collection to become increasingly difficult to challenge.