
The Google Nest security system has a hidden microphone built into it that isn’t featured in any of the schematics for the device. Voice data, and all the information delivered through your daily conversations, is tremendously valuable to Big Data, and add to their ever-expanding predictive modelling capabilities.
You cannot run away from it. You are slave.
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,” says Czesław Miłosz, to illustrate the ‘Slave-dom’ in which social media users are in without their knowledge.
In recent years, a number of brave individuals have alerted us to the fact that we’re all being monitored and manipulated by big data gatherers such as Google and Facebook, and shed light on the depth and breadth of this ongoing surveillance. Among them is social psychologist and Harvard Prof Shoshana Zuboff.
Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is one of the best books I have read in the last few years. It’s an absolute must-read if you have any interest in this topic and want to understand how Google and Facebook have obtained such massive control of your life.
Her book reveals how the biggest tech companies in the world have hijacked our personal data – so-called “behavioural surplus data streams” – without our knowledge or consent and are using it against us to generate profits for themselves. WE have become the product. WE are the real revenue stream in this digital economy.
“The term ‘surveillance capitalism’ is not an arbitrary term,” Zuboff says in the VPRO Backlight documentary below. “Why ‘surveillance’? Because it must be operations that are engineered as undetectable, indecipherable, cloaked in rhetoric that aims to misdirect, obfuscate and downright bamboozle all of us, all the time.”
In the video above, Zuboff “reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but the citizen itself, serves are a raw material.” She also explains how this surveillance capitalism came about in the first place.
As with most revolutionary inventions, chance played a role. After the 2000 dot.com crisis that burst the internet bubble, a start-up company named Google struggled to survive. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin appeared to be looking at the beginning of the end for their company.
By chance, they discovered that “residual data” left behind by users during their internet searches had tremendous value. They could trade this data; they could sell it. By compiling this residual data, they could predict the behaviour of any given internet user and thus guarantee advertisers a more targeted audience. And so, surveillance capitalism was born.
Comments such as “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t care if they track me,” or “I like targeted ads because they make my shopping easier” reveal our ignorance about what’s really going on.
We believe we understand what kind of information is being collected about us. For example, you might not care that Google knows you bought a particular kind of shoe or a particular book.
However, the information we freely hand over is the least important of the personal information actually being gathered about us, Zuboff notes.
Tech companies tell us the data collected is being used to improve services, and indeed, some of it is.
But it is also being used to model human behaviour by analysing the patterns of behaviour of hundreds of millions of people. Once you have a large enough training model, you can begin to accurately predict how different types of individuals will behave over time.
The data gathered is also being used to predict a whole host of individual attributes about you, such as personality quirks, sexual orientation, political orientation – “a whole range of things we never ever intended to disclose,” Zuboff says.
All sorts of predictive data are handed over with each photo you upload to social media. For example, it’s not just that tech companies can see your photos. Your face is being used without your knowledge or consent to train facial recognition software, and none of us is told how that software is intended to be used.
As just one example, the Chinese government is using facial recognition software to track and monitor minority groups and advocates for democracy and that could happen elsewhere as well, at any time.
So that photo you uploaded of yourself at a party provides a range of valuable information – from the types of people you’re most likely to spend your time with and where you’re likely to go to have a good time, to information about how the muscles in your face move and alter the shape of your features when you’re in a good mood.
By gathering a staggering amount of data points on each person, minute by minute, Big Data can make very accurate predictions about human behaviour, and these predictions are then “sold to business customers who want to maximise our value to their business,” Zuboff says.
Your entire existence – even your shifting moods, deciphered by facial recognition software – has become a source of revenue for many tech corporations. You might think you have free will but, in reality, you’re being cleverly maneuverer and funnelled into doing (and typically buying) or thinking something you may not have done, bought or thought otherwise. And, “our ignorance is their bliss,” Zuboff says.
In the documentary, Zuboff highlights Facebook’s massive “contagion experiments,” in which they used subliminal cues and language manipulation to see if they could make people feel happier or sadder and affect real-world behaviour offline. As it turns out, they can. Two key findings from those experiments were:
By manipulating language and inserting subliminal cues in the online context, they can change real-world behaviour and real-world emotion. These methods and powers can be exercised “while bypassing user awareness”.
In the video, Zuboff also explains how the Pokemon Go online game, which was actually created by Google, was engineered to manipulate real-world behaviour and activity for profit. She also describes the scheme in her New York Times article, saying:
“Game players did not know that they were pawns in the real game of behaviour modification for profit, as the rewards and punishments of hunting imaginary creatures were used to herd people to the McDonald’s, Starbucks and local pizza joints that were paying the company for ‘footfall,’ in exactly the same way that online advertisers pay for ‘click through’ to their websites.”
Zuboff also reviews what we learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica is a political marketing business that, in 2018, used the Facebook data of 80 million Americans to determine the best strategies for manipulating American voters.
- Children’s Health Defence report / Originally published by Mercola