Intelligence Squared The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, with Shoshana Zuboff and Rosamund Urwin
Aug 30, 2019
Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard professor and author, explores the dark world of surveillance capitalism. She reveals how tech giants commodify our personal data, driving inequality and impacting democracy. Zuboff discusses the ethical dilemmas of user data exploitation and the growing awareness of its threats to privacy. Alongside journalist Rosamund Urwin, she examines the strategies of major companies to address privacy issues while maintaining profit, highlighting the need for stronger regulations and collective action against data misuse.
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Surveillance Capitalism Defined
- Surveillance capitalism takes private human experience into the marketplace, turning it into behavioral data.
- This data is used to predict and modify our behavior, creating prediction products sold to businesses.
Users as Raw Material
- Users are not the product of surveillance capitalism, but the source of free raw material.
- Companies extract behavioral surplus, data beyond what's needed for product improvement.
Political Micro-targeting
- The Obama campaign pioneered political micro-targeting using techniques learned from Google.
- These same methods were later used by Cambridge Analytica for different political goals.
