I just discovered Shoshana Zuboff’s news. I am more unsettled than ever, and I feel obliged to tell you about it.
Announcement: I created a summary page to keep track of what is going on with this topic at «surveillance and privacy».
Her book «The age of surveillance capitalism» asserts that the internet has ushered in a fundamentally new business paradigm. It is based on the following recipe:
- Your online footprint should be maximized. The more «useful apps» can be palmed off on the masses, the better.
- That footprint is fed into big machines to learn all about you – in your deepest intimacy. I suspect google or facebook already knows a lot of people more precisely than the people themselves.
- Once steps 1 and 2 are well advanced, the resulting knowledge can be utilized to turn around and shape your life, actions, opinions. Billions are already made by selling sharply targeted, immersive, and hard to spot ads and nudges.
The reason I invest into writing this article is that I feel remorse.
Shoshana Zuboff’s Input
I recommend reading, watching, or listening to her. There is quite some coverage, so here are just some random examples:
- The book: „The age of surveillance capitalism“
- A video: Chat with Naomi Klein on March 1, 2019 for The Intercept
- A podcast: Interview by Kara Swisher of Recode on January 20th, 2019
- An article in English: «The goal is to automate us» in the Guardian
- An article in German: „Den freien Willen killen“ im Stern
- Another very good article in German: «Surveillance Capitalism – Überwachungskapitalismus – Essay» bei der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung
Feeling Scared
After letting this sink in, I feel the urge to finally implement some long procrastinated plans. These are pledges, and due to the enmeshed situation, they might take quite some time to implement.
Some of it is about my personal life. Even though I always considered myself careful online, never actively shared much on social platforms, I have a huge footprint online. I have been an early adopter and heavy user of many google products, I love cashless payment methods for their convenience (duh!), and I love the convenience of ordering books, water filters, hats, and diapers online.
The case of facebook is interesting. I never actively use it to share much of my life. However, many friends I know use it, and some events like concerts and such are only announced behind the facebook wall. Thus, I am usually logged in to facebook with my main web browser. Now many websites use facebook widgets (comments, tracking pixels and others). Every site that does that helps facebook follow me around – even though I don’t consider myself as a «facebook user».
Thus, I am currently quite well known to a collective of large companies who are explicitly mentioned in Shoshana Zuboff’s research.
Feeling Remorse
On the other hand, I run web apps that are used by millions of people around the world. Just like many others, I have been a happy user of wonderful free services. Among others, I have been a user of google analytics for website statistics, google adsense for serving ads, google adwords for advertisement, and gmail for email correspondence.
As Shoshana Zuboff explains, these tools and services are all simply part of one huge scheme to suck out your life, devour it, and eventually take over control of your life completely.
If you use my free services, I feed your life to those companies. That’s where I feel remorse.
Pledges
On a personal level, I plan to do the following:
- Move my email accounts off google servers.
- Delete as many online accounts as possible.
- Disable as many cookies as possible.
- Use the Tor Browser as often as possible.
- Buy as much stuff offline (in brick and mortar stores!) as possible.
- Revert to using cash instead of mobile and credit card payments.
- Install and enable «TrackMeNot» to obfuscate my search traffic on as many devices as possible.
- Rethink my data backup strategies. How many of those dropbox, OneDrive, box and other services are really necessary? How will I best manage physical backup harddrives?
With my web apps, I plan to minimize the use of third party services:
- Avoid all third parties for paid features and services.
- Increase the number of features that can be paid for.
- Aim to make the web apps self-sustaining financially without the need to sell out your life.
Obviously, you are an active part in this situation: as long as you hang on to the belief that services are free, you will continue to be fed to the titans.
The Good News
Most of my paid web apps, and some of the free ones are completely third party free. Examples:
- The premium online notepad service shrib.co uses zero third party services. For a small fee, you get the fastest online notepad – without tracking, and without knowledge of google, facebook, etc.
- The secure online notepad secure.shrib.com explicitly avoids all third party services to maximize your privacy. On top of that, you get multiple layers of authentication to make it impossible for anyone to read your notes. Read more about it on my blog.
What about You?
What do you do about this? How do you feel about Shoshana Zuboff’s message? Do you know of more ways to reduce the exposure to the machine?
For me, the moment I understood that the ‹product› a TV channel sells is the user/viewer’s attention was scary. That was a decade ago. With the internet it’s not just our attention, but also information about our habits and behaviours that Google or Facebook sell. So even if I shield myself from ads with ad-blockers, those companies can still make money from my information.
That’s exactly right, Gabriel. And as I mention on the side on the page Surveillance and Privacy, there are nice and pretty easy ways to avoid that: disable all third party tracking, or outright disable all cookies. The latter makes some online web apps or forums that you want to participate in a bit cumbersome (you have to whitelist each one, including any subdomains or authentication domains they use), but it is worthwhile. Living outside the youtube-bubble for a few weeks myself now, for instance, has surfaced a lot of completely new topics for me.
There’s another review here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-facebook-corrupted-capitalism/#!