Surveillance Capitalism In A Nutshell
When you browse around on the internet or search something on your favorite search engine or use one of many apps on your phone, you're also giving away bits and pieces of data about yourself through online tracking. Many of the websites and apps employ online tracking to see what exactly you do online. It tracks things like what you prefer and what you scroll past, what triggers you and what makes you calm, amount of time spent watching a piece of content and the stuff you shared with your family and friends, what you searched on search engines and what you typed in your emails, etc. All these little bits and pieces of raw data eventually feed into some central data repository where some buggy machine learning algorithm creates a behavioral profile on you. It basically judges you for all the decisions you make online. And it constantly refines the profile as more and more data comes its way. All this data is very valuable to social media companies, data brokers, banks, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies and, of course, governments.
At the same time, you're bombarded with mostly irrelevant advertisement after advertisement based on your online profile. These ads are often in image, audio or video formats and there are also pieces of code attached to them, usually in Javascript. These ads aren't just annoying and distracting, the ads are using your bandwidth, your CPU cycles and your battery power to get downloaded, run and shown on your devices without getting your explicit permission.
The process through which a particular ad is shown to you is quite elaborate in a dystopian way. In very simplified terms, what happens is that your profile is auctioned off to the highest bidder who gets a tiny slice of your attention when the ad is shown on your screen. And if that's not enough, malicious actors have abused online ad networks to spread malware on phones and computers through advertisements.
What's more, your ISP and mobile service providers (who are just supposed to provide dumb data pipes) are tracking all the websites you visit by logging your DNS queries and doing deep packet inspection of all the traffic. And, what do they do with this data? They most probably sell it to data brokers, advertisers or other third party companies. But in their privacy policies, they never explicitly state that. Instead, they say stuff like this which gives them a lot of wiggle room : "This privacy policy may change at any time. We don't share your data with anyone except when it's used to improve our services and it's done only with our highly trusted partners". It's just lawyerspeak to ensure that the company isn't held responsible if all hell breaks loose.
That's surveillance capitalism for you. Companies extract data from you and provide you with products and services except the data they get reveals a lot more about you than you want to reveal and it can be misused and abused.
How Do We Fight Back?
So, you always end up getting the short end of the stick when dealing with these companies. Now, you may ask, how can we counter surveillance capitalism? Well, there is one simple answer : Stop dealing with companies that treat you like you're the product and not the customer. If enough people started speaking with their wallets and demanded change, then may be these companies will alter their downright criminal business models. Maybe government can step in and enact strong, user-centric data collection and protection laws. But don't count on it because ultimately the laws will be weak and full of loopholes. All the billions of dollars spent by tech companies on lobbying (what a cute name for corruption, by the way) almost guarantee it.
Until any of that happens, and I do hope something happens sooner than later, we can't just sit around and do nothing. Thankfully, there are enough good people in the world who have written and contributed towards many free and open source projects which help us oppose this tyranny. We should use these free and open source alternatives whenever and wherever we can. And we should spread the word so others can do it too. I do my little part by writing articles about these projects on this very blog and pestering my friends and family to switch to privacy-respecting products and services! No regrets!