Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are spearheading the surveillance market transformation, placing themselves at the top tier of the epistemic hierarchy. They know everything about you and you know nothing about them. You don’t even know what they know about you.

“They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a manoeuvre that every child recognises as theft,” social psychologist and Harvard Prof Shoshana Zuboff, writes in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Zuboff argues, “Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Our lives are rendered as data flows.”

These data flows are about you, but not for you. All of it is used against you – to separate you from your money, or to make you act in a way that is in some way profitable for a company or a political agenda.

So, ask yourself, where is your freedom in all of this?

If a company can cause you to buy stuff you don’t need by sticking an enticing, personalised advert for something they know will boost your confidence at the exact moment you’re feeling insecure or worthless (a tactic that has been tested and perfected), are you really acting through free will?

If an artificial intelligence using predictive modelling senses you’re getting hungry (based on a variety of cues such as your location, facial expressions and verbal expressions) and launches an ad from a local restaurant to you in the very moment you’re deciding to get something to eat, are you really making conscious, self-driven, value-based life choices?

As noted by Zuboff in her article: “Unequal knowledge about us produces unequal power over us, and so epistemic inequality widens to include the distance between what we can do and what can be done to us. Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system.

“Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behaviour to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives.

“This third imperative, ‘economies of action,’ has become an arena of intense experimentation. ‘We are learning how to write the music,’ one scientist said, ‘and then we let the music make them dance’ …

“The fact is that in the absence of corporate transparency and democratic oversight, epistemic inequality rules. They know. They decide who knows. They decide who decides. The public’s intolerable knowledge disadvantage is deepened by surveillance capitalists’ perfection of mass communications as gaslighting …

“On April 30, 2019, Mark Zuckerberg made a dramatic announcement at the company’s annual developer conference, declaring, ‘The future is private.’ A few weeks later, a Facebook litigator appeared before a federal district judge in California to thwart a user lawsuit over privacy invasion, arguing that the very act of using Facebook negates any reasonable expectation of privacy ‘as a matter of law.’”

In the video, Zuboff points out that there are no laws in place to curtail this brand-new type of surveillance capitalism, and the only reason it has been able to flourish over the past 20 years is because there’s been an absence of laws against it, primarily because it has never previously existed.

That’s the problem with epistemic inequality. Google and Facebook were the only ones who knew what they were doing. The surveillance network grew in the shadows, unbeknownst to the public or lawmakers. Had we fought against it for two decades, then we might have had to resign ourselves to defeat, but as it stands, we’ve never even tried to regulate it.

This, Zuboff says, should give us all hope. We can turn this around and take back our privacy, but we need legislation that addresses the actual reality of the entire breadth and depth of the data collection system.

It’s not enough to address just the data that we know that we’re giving when we go online.

Zuboff writes: “These contests of the 21st century demand a framework of epistemic rights enshrined in law and subject to democratic governance. Such rights would interrupt data supply chains by safeguarding the boundaries of human experience before they come under assault from the forces of datafication.

“The choice to turn any aspect of one’s life into data must belong to individuals by virtue of their rights in a democratic society. This means, for example, that companies cannot claim the right to your face, or use your face as free raw material for analysis, or own and sell any computational products that derive from your face…

“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.

“Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They have an Achilles heel: fear. They fear lawmakers who do not fear them. They fear citizens who demand a new road forward as they insist on new answers to old questions: Who will know? Who will decide who knows? Who will decide who decides? Who will write the music, and who will dance?”

While there’s no doubt we need a whole new legislative framework to curtail surveillance capitalism, in the meantime, there are ways you can protect your privacy online and limit the “behavioural surplus data” collected about you.