Article: Your Data Can and Will Be Used to Manipulate You—Surveillance Capitalism

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What does shopping online, texting on a smartphone, liking an image on social media, wearing a fitness tracker, or searching the internet all have in common?

Each activity produces the desired result, such as obtaining a product or connecting with a friend. However, these activities online or through smart devices do much more. Such activities produce large amounts of information about the person using them. What product a person selects, what they read, and how they react to a social media post get recorded and analyzed using artificial intelligence by the corporations, governments, and institutions providing the services. For example, online streaming services will suggest movies or TV shows to a user based on past preferences and selections made by other people with similar tastes. These suggestions for new content come from artificial intelligence programs that consume usage data from millions of users. These computer programs, also called algorithms, voraciously consume data to make better and more accurate predictions. An, algorithm refers to the processes and rules that a computer follows to produce information, such as predicting what TV show you might like.

You may have wondered why companies like Google and TikTok never charge prices for using their platforms or why many apps do not charge for their use. The answer lies in the fact that they gather precious information from you interacting with their tools. Every time someone "likes" a video or forwards a TikTok to a friend or updates their weight goals in their fitness tracker, the owner of the platform or app learns more about human behavior. Such behavioral data has become a valuable commodity that companies buy, sell, and analyze. The commodifying of human behavioral data generated massive wealth and power for major tech companies and has led to a new term—"surveillance capitalism."

Coined by the Harvard Business School emeritus professor Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism refers to the commodification of personal data for targeted marketing to individuals. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Dr. Zuboff suggests that once tech companies determined the power of personal data for direct, individual marketing, the companies' fortunes exploded and ushered in a new brand of capitalism. In a lecture at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah in October 2021, Zuboff stated, "In today's surveillance economy, personal information is the stolen treasure." (youtube.com)

Back in 2014, Facebook came under fire following a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science detailing the results of an experiment conducted on Facebook users. The article, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" (PNAS.org), describes research coordinated between Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California, San Francisco. Their study used computer algorithms to manipulate individual News Feeds on Facebook to demonstrate that they could manipulate Facebook users' emotions.

Any time someone uses the internet for shopping, social media to connect with friends or celebrities, or a fitness device to track personal health goals, they reveal behavioral information through their choices and activities. In combination with artificial intelligence, massive amounts of behavioral data have led to increased predictive power for marketers to find and focus their advertising on individual people. Targeted marketing may not be new, but the precision and scale possible through smartphones and laptops is unprecedented. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff coined surveillance capitalism to describe the latest state of hyper marketing designed to target and manipulate people to exchange their money for goods and services. Surveillance capitalism insists that human behavioral information has become a new commodity controlled by powerful corporations collaborating with the government. By this definition, it may not be a new form of capitalism but a better, more effective way of marketing. Regardless of the definition, surveillance capitalism should make us reevaluate the value of our data, our privacy, and the power of algorithms to manipulate individual behavior.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.