In this episode, Sarah returns to the podcast to help Rich dive deep into a review of VPRO’s landmark documentary: Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism is the core of the business model for today’s Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook. It’s not about your email address, phone number or social security. Surveillance capitalism is all about collecting voluminous amounts of rich, behavioral data on platform users to develop models that predict future behavior. These predictions can in turn be sold to advertisers that are looking to reach niche markets. Predictive models developed by Google and Facebook are so sophisticated that they can practically guarantee advertiser success.
The key here is that Big Tech is selling predictions, not data. In fact, the models are so advanced that they can even be used to manipulate users’ behavior.
Shoshana Zuboff is a Harvard Professor and author of the groundbreaking book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She has been researching the area of surveillance capitalism for years and asserts that in order for surveillance capitalism to work, it must happen through stealth and obfuscation. In other words, users of platforms like Google Search and Facebook must be so hooked on using these products that they don’t see how the monetization model works. The more engaged users are, the more behavioral data that can be collected, and the more precise those predictive models can be.
We hope this episode will spur some thinking about what type of personal data is truly valuable to Big Tech and get you to reevaluate your own use of various web-based products.
And don’t forget, as it has been said many times, “If the product is free, you are the product!”
Link to watch documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
