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Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance Capitalism - Coggle Diagram
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance Capitalism
Transformation of Economic model
Ford Motor Company
Mass-production based
Managerial Capilalism
Maximize profit
Increasing volumes
Decreasing costs
Widening demand
Mass-production begins with the perception of need
Google
Surveillance Capitalism
Features of the Google Model
Operations Inaccessible
operations not accessible to outside researchers
company executives publicly speak of
digital evangelism
promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force
Google's
Mission Statement
organize the world's information
making information universally accessible
Opposition to Adveritising
Secrecy
Hiding strategy:
Internal spying programme
employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate firm's confidentiality
Computer mediated transactions
data extraction and analysis
data as raw material for
Surveillance Capitalism
monitoring
personalization and customization
continuous experiments
Division of Learning
shapes the
information civilization
Behavioural modification
Models that were replicated beyond the companies that initiated the models
Capitalism
competitive production
profit maximization
reinvest surplus
increase labour productivity
accumulation
Discovery of
behavioural surplus
Google's accidental data caches
number of search terms
pattern of search terms
phrasing
spelling
punctuation
dwell times
click patterns
location
can shape
recursive learning systems
prediction derived from user behaviour
without caring about what happens wellbeing of users
target advertising to individual users
no additional cost
So far used to improve search results
Initial Google advertising
linked to search queries
click-through rate
track clicks on ad
Advertiser's keyword matched with search term
Advertising based on
behavioral surplus
Cost of Ad =
Price per click
X
Google's estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad
Catching user's attention at a time when they might have a high probability of being influenced
Matching ads to interests and
profile
User Profile Information (UPI)
derived from
Information voluntarily provided by the user
derived from user actions
websites visited
psychographics
browsing activity
information about previous advertisements
purchases made
Secret access
: Google scientists will not be deterred by users' exercise of decision rights over their personal information, despite the fact that such rights were an inherent feature of the original social contract between the company and its users.
Competitive advantage:
Google had the technology and access to data to convert the data into predictions of who will click on which configuration of an ad
Depended on
online surveillance
at scale
Implications on
Privacy
of Users
April 2001 - Congress considered three bills proposing to regulate cookies
Secrecy needed to keep operations undetectable
Ever growing hunger for data as Data ~ Accuracy
Fallacy of privacy protection
sell results not data
Google claims no
violation of privacy
AdSense
: Google patented content targeted advertising
Google's revenues 3590% in 4 years:
2002 - $347 million
2003 - $1.5 billion
2004 - $3.5 billion
thoughts
feelings
intentions
interests
Users'
non-market
online behaviour
collateral search data
by-product of user interactions
data exhaust
surveillance assets
Google Page Rank
Value for user
No revenue generation
Data collected reinvested in improving user experience
counterproductive to charge users fee for search services
Alternative approaches by other Search Engines
Overture
Advertisers pay for high ranking search listings
Dot-Com Bubble Bust April 2000
Business model based on Quick Returns and low investment no longer working
Pressure from investors to register profitable balance sheet
Google owners give up opposition to advertising
Implications of Surveillance Capitalism
users were no longer ends in themselves but became means to others' ends
take information from users in secret and use it for the benefit of others
violates
decision rights
of users
Google is lying to gather trust
Google's business model needs trust
Other applications of Surveillance Capitalism
Facebook
"Our mission is to connect every person in the world.
You don't do that by having a service people pay for."
Beacon
: automatically share transactions with all of a user's "friends"
Inserted advertisers to Facebook Feed
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