The title of this notes is inspired by a recent The New York Times Op-Ed titled You Are Now Remotely Controlled authored by Prof Shoshana Zuboff.

In a previous notes on Free Tech Products & Services I briefly mentioned about Surveillance Capitalism, a term popularized by Harvard Business School Prof Shoshana Zuboff and her recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Related Notes

• On Free Tech Products & Services
• Mass Surveillance – A Permanent Fingerprints of Our Daily Lives
• Surveilling Ourselves
• Free WiFi, Apps & Student Tracking

In a recent The New York Times Op-Ed titled You Are Now Remotely Controlled author Shoshana Zuboff writes in great detail how big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, twitter and many others are collecting personal information from consumers and selling their personal data to data brokers for profit without consent.

She writes that “surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows”. She further writes “the data are conveyed through complex supply chains of devices, tracking and monitoring software, and ecosystems of apps and companies that specialize in niche data flows captured in secret”.

We celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policyClose X, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.

Shoshana Zuboff, Op-Ed The New York Times

The OpEd article with a tagline “surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth” is a resourceful read about personal information collection & data privacy. She further writes: “Anything made by humans can be unmade by humans. Surveillance capitalism is young, barely 20 years in the making, but democracy is old, rooted in generations of hope and contest.”

Further Readings

• You Are Now Remotely Controlled | The New York Times
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Prof Shoshana Zubof
• Surveillance capitalism’ has gone rogue. We must curb its excesses | The Washington Post

Contents of this Notes is sourced from The New York Times’ OpEd You are Now Controlled Remotely by Prof Shoshana Zuboff. Cover image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay..