Surveillance capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.

Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self), societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing, this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy.

The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior. Personal smart phone data is available by corporate equipment which pretends to be cell telephone towers thus tracking and monitoring private persons in public spaces which is sold to governments or other companies. Therefore, personal data points increase in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known. As a result, the increasing price of data has limited access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.

Shoshana Zuboff writes that "analysing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems". In 2014, Vincent Mosco referred to the marketing of information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and made note of the surveillance state alongside it. Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.

Similarly, Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as informants for this type of capitalism. Zuboff contrasts the mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism, where the former was interdependent with its populations, who were its consumers and employees, and the latter preys on dependent populations, who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures.

Their research shows that the capitalist addition to the analysis of massive amounts of data has taken its original purpose in an unexpected direction. Surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power further from nation-states and towards large corporations employing the surveillance capitalist logic.

Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism extends beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm, accumulating not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, and operating without meaningful mechanisms of consent. In other words, analysing massive data sets was at some point not only executed by the state apparatuses but also companies. Zuboff claims that both Google and Facebook have invented surveillance capitalism and translated it into "a new logic of accumulation".

This mutation resulted in both companies collecting very large numbers of data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a profit. By selling these data points to external users (particularly advertisers), it has become an economic mechanism. The combination of the analysis of massive data sets and the use of these data sets as a market mechanism has shaped the concept of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism has been heralded as the successor to neoliberalism.