surveillance capitalism
In plain wordsA business model in which companies collect huge amounts of data about people's behavior and use it to predict and influence what they will do, mainly to sell advertising.
Shoshana Zuboff's name for an economic order that treats people's lives as a free resource to be mined: companies record what users do, keep far more of the resulting data than their services need (her 'behavioral surplus'), and use machine learning to turn it into predictions of behavior that are sold, above all to advertisers. In her account the business then moves from forecasting behavior to steering it through nudges and design, undermining autonomy and democracy by creating unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power. In AI debates the term frames the data-hungry business models behind recommender systemsrecommender system, n.: Software that guesses which songs, products, posts or jobs you are most likely to want and shows those first, as when a video app lines up the next clip or a shop suggests an add-on., ad targeting and personalized assistants, and the concern that ad-funded conversational AI could carry the model into intimate domains. Critics question the novelty of the analysis and the real effectiveness of behavioral manipulation.
If the assistant is free and ad-funded, he warned, it will drift toward surveillance capitalism.
Origin
Popularized by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff in a 2014 essay, the 2015 article 'Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization' and the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney had used the phrase in a different, Marxist sense in Monthly Review in 2014.
Related
- AI surveillanceAI surveillance, n.: Using AI to watch, identify, track or profile people on a scale no team of humans could manage, for example by scanning camera feeds or analyzing phone and online data.
- engagement optimizationengagement optimization, n.: Designing apps and AI to keep people clicking, watching or chatting for as long as possible because that earns money, even when it is not what is good for them.
- recommender systemrecommender system, n.: Software that guesses which songs, products, posts or jobs you are most likely to want and shows those first, as when a video app lines up the next clip or a shop suggests an add-on.
- concentration of powerconcentration of power, n.: The worry that AI will put enormous economic, political or military power in the hands of a few companies, governments or individuals, beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances.
- AI colonialismAI colonialism, n.: The criticism that the AI industry repeats patterns of colonial empires, taking data, labor, land and resources from poorer places and peoples while profits and control stay with a few rich companies and countries.
Sources
- Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology 30(1), 75–89.
- Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
Mentioned in
privacyprivacy, n.: Your ability to control who knows what about you. AI raises new privacy questions because it learns from huge amounts of personal data and can infer things about people they never shared., AI colonialismAI colonialism, n.: The criticism that the AI industry repeats patterns of colonial empires, taking data, labor, land and resources from poorer places and peoples while profits and control stay with a few rich companies and countries., AI surveillanceAI surveillance, n.: Using AI to watch, identify, track or profile people on a scale no team of humans could manage, for example by scanning camera feeds or analyzing phone and online data., concentration of powerconcentration of power, n.: The worry that AI will put enormous economic, political or military power in the hands of a few companies, governments or individuals, beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances., dark patterndark pattern, n.: A trick in the design of an app, website or chatbot that nudges you into doing something you didn't mean to, like signing up for a subscription that is hard to cancel., contextual integritycontextual integrity, n.: A way of thinking about privacy: information is not simply public or private; what matters is whether it flows in ways that fit the expectations of the setting where it was shared.