Surveillance capitalism is the utilization of technologies which, with or without the consent of the consumer (or data subject) captures personal data for monetization.
HARVARD scholar and author Shoshana Zuboff wrote a book about it, explaining how advertising, with its algorithms and apps follow people around, push products, services, concepts and ideas for users to unwittingly consume or believe in. In the process, it invades on privacy and even individual freedom, and even, argues the Zuboff, threatens democracy.
Nobel laureate Maria Ressa spoke about surveillance capitalism in her speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, calling surveillance capitalism “a foundational threat to markets and elections.”
Surveillance capitalism is the utilization of technologies which, with or without the consent of the consumer (or data subject) captures personal data for monetization. This monetization comes from collecting, processing and manipulating massive amounts of data gathered–coming from browsing through a Facebook page, or reading off a sidebar on Google Chrome or clicking a footer ad on mobile phones. Practically every act done online is monitored and logged making a list of the user’s online activities and behaviors.
“It’s a new economic order that claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data,” Zuboff writes in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
When Zuboff coined the term in 2015, she had also effectively forecast how it will involve predictive analysis of massive datasets (called big data) that profile the lives and behaviors millions of people. Huge amounts of computer power is then used to create correlations and patterns. This compiled information allows future behavior of individuals or groups to be predicted.
Zuboff says it is akin to a new economic order and, “claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”
This data is then sold to, or used by companies to create dynamic, personalized and targeted advertising. Clicking on an online ad that suddenly appear adds that behavior to a database which refines its outputs and interactions by constantly testing numerous variations of concepts and ideas to different demographics, artificial intelligence bots determine what works best. This explains why, after clicking an ad on rubber shoes, for example, the next set of ads that appear on Facebook or Google suggests popular shoe brands that are sold on either Lazada, Shopee, Amazon, eBay or Alibaba.
Every time a user goes online, clicks on a few URLs and searches for things, people or ideas, they also become unwitting subject to online experiments designed to find out how to make users spend more money.
And since netizens only way to connect online to use browsers and social media apps, they become prey to this surveillance. Digital advertising, in its current intrusive state manipulates consumers to spend more money so that companies can maximize profits.
Filipinos, who spend 10.6 hours online, 7.2 hours of that on social media, according to a Datareportal.com are fair game.
Though there are no reports or studies to show how rampant surveillance capitalism is in the Philippines, it is safe to say that the huge amount of datasets collected from Filipinos may have been used for no good. Online fraud increased 37 percent from 2020 to 2021 mostly due social engineering and phishing, as well as the extensive use of digital equivalents of pawnshops and loan sharks.
In 2014, the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica captured millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, and used this personal information taken without consent to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements.
Cambridge Analytica’s 2018 scandal involved the harvesting of around 50 million profiles of Facebook users using a resident app called “thisisyourdigitallife, built by a programmer and academic Aleksandr Kogan. Users took a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for “academic use.”
Before it was shut down in 2018, the firm had created big data platform with enough data points to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box, according to a whistleblower and former employee of Cambridge Analytica. Notable is how the company worked with Donald Trump’s election team, lobbied for sentiments to move towards winning the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, did a spin to sanitize the Marcos name in the Philippines.
But wait. It isn’t just access and availability to personal profiles that is being sold.
As data is commoditized, so are people and their lives. The ever-present surveillance network gives access to its “subscriber” to powerful behavioral modification tools using knowledge gained about a person’s preferences, like color, design or even psychological vulnerabilities, like choices of music or movies, which is honed through prototyping various inputs until a desired effect is achieved. For example, on popular e-commerce platforms, the twin digit promotions like 12.12 or holiday giveaways for “sweldo 15” is widely used and copied–very effective in the Philippines, but may not be as effective elsewhere.
The ability to localize the campaigns through pervasive surveillance apparatus may have had disastrous consequences to build up intricate knowledge of the daily lives and behaviors of hundreds of millions of people and then charge other companies to use this knowledge against us for their benefit.
An offshoot of surveillance capitalism–social engineering and phishing–the less than digital means of data collection is responsible for the upsurge in privacy violations from financing, lending apps and text-based platforms.
Take the case of Fynamics Lending Inc., and their online lending app PondoPeso. A total of 113 complaints were filed at the National Privacy Commission against the company last year. Violations of the use of personal information of the app users–using the phonebook or contact list to get in touch with relatives and friends with the objective of damaging “reputation of data subjects or to harass, threaten, or coerce them to settle their loans.”
As data is commoditized, so are people and their lives. The ever-present surveillance network gives access to its “subscriber” to powerful behavioral modification tools using knowledge gained about a person’s preferences, like color, design or even psychological vulnerabilities, like choices of music or movies, which is honed through prototyping various inputs until a desired effect is achieved.
The NPC ruled that the methods used by PondoPeso in personal data processing information were “unduly intrusive, including posting on social media of personal and sensitive personal information of data subjects or even subjecting their contacts to threats and harassment. The personal information processed was excessive or otherwise used for purposes beyond what is necessary or authorized under their agreement.”
But surveillance capitalism may also use even less sophisticated methods to fool users, as in the case of text-based messages calling looking for investors to start-ups or property, offering employment with the promise of P3,000 to P8,000 a day, all for the purpose of data collection. Although not following the model that Zuboff explained in its entirety, it still used a modest amount of analysis to target specific prey, after a massive social engineering bluff. The surveillance remains intact, even if mobile telephone numbers are randomly generated.
Email phishing is a different game altogether because the variety of user names with a similar email suffix (like gmail.com or yahoo.com) is difficult to achieve and spam controls usually thwart such attempts which are tedious and costly to the perpetrators. Some finesse and persuasion is needed when social engineering is used, and usually it is either the greedy or the gullible who are victims.
Surveillance capitalism is now the predominant business model in the Internet. Its proliferation may result to the total loss of control of devices and personal data. Since advertising is the only viable revenue model online, as people are unwilling to pay even a small amount for access to online services, using surveillance techniques aided that revenue model and made advertising more profitable.
