surveillance capitalism
surveillance capitalism, practice of private companies monitoring individuals’ online activity in order to accumulate their data for profit. This practice is usually hidden from the public and takes place in a legal gray area, having been largely unregulated until 2018, when European lawmakers introduced a rule requiring reform in how companies practice surveillance. Surveillance capitalism is based on the premise that online activity is not truly private and that consumer data can be harvested without the knowledge, consent, or compensation of the individuals whose data is being monetized.
The term surveillance capitalism was coined by Harvard economist Shoshana Zuboff, who described three steps in its historical development and normalization. Zuboff argued that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, companies had begun to practice “incursion,” identifying how to profit from online human behavior such as searching on Google or creating a Facebook profile. When Internet users did this, companies secretly gathered and stored their data, a practice that was legal because it had not previously existed and was therefore unregulated. In this period, privacy rights were a minor concern.
According to Zuboff, companies then encouraged “habituation,” through which consumers became entrenched in online behavior and competition eroded. Not using online tools was simply not an option for most people, so when the scale of data harvesting and exploitation came to light, the effect of this public knowledge on people’s behavior was limited—people knew that their smartphones were tracking them but kept buying them anyway.
The final step of surveillance capitalism was “adaption,” in which companies use data to attempt to modify users’ behavior to increase their profits. For data harvesters, this amounted to, in Zuboff’s words, “selling certainty” to clients, such as in 2017 when leaked documents showed that Facebook had told finance customers that it could use data to identify teenagers in emotional distress and display advertising that would appeal to them.
Two areas in which surveillance capitalism has had a significant and easily definable impact are the insurance and government surveillance markets. Health insurance companies purchase data to analyze their customers’ behavior and individual health risks, which helps the companies determine the rates customers should be charged. For example, companies may collect data from sleep apnea machines or fitness watches. Many companies have also sold customer data to government agencies such as the CIA and FBI. Surveillance capitalism has important implications for government repression. A particularly potent example of this is the Chinese government’s use of data monitoring to track the activity of dissidents and members of the Uyghur minority through apps such as WeChat. While corporations such as Google continue to collect data, many third-party data brokers have emerged. This has created an incentive for companies to engage in some form of surveillance capitalism, as businesses that harvest their users’ data have a competitive edge over those that do not.
Surveillance capitalism can also influence elections and other political institutions in modern democracies. For example, in 2018 the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica became the subject of a scandal when a whistleblower revealed that it had been profiting by using data to attempt to modify American voter behavior. The data gathered through surveillance capitalism has also been exploited in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) software, which is trained using massive datasets originating from Web users. For example, AI bots and deepfake technology can spread misinformation among voters, targeting specific groups of people.
Some critics consider the data industry to be unethical for turning privately lived human experiences into raw data. Others argue that companies engaging in surveillance capitalism should be viewed and regulated as a societal threat because their actions exploit the vulnerable and may increase inequality by creating economic “winners” and “losers.” Many of these critics, including Zuboff, argue for stringent regulation that would make selling data related to behavioral predictions and modifications illegal.
In response to public pressure, some companies have modified how they collect data from their users. Apple implemented an “opt-in” policy for tracking in 2021, and in 2023 Google planned to reform its use of advertising cookies to afford users more privacy.
Such responses from private companies seek to decrease government interference. Nonetheless, the European Union (EU) in particular has been increasingly aggressive about regulating surveillance and data gathering within its territory. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law went into effect in 2018, and the EU European Data Protection Board has issued various rulings limiting the data-harvesting practices of companies within the EU.