Christopher Wylie, now-former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, blew the whistle on the company’s methods of illicitly collecting clients data without their knowledge or consent. According to Wylie, they had so much data on people, they knew exactly how to trigger fear, rage and paranoia in any given individual.

And, by triggering those emotions, they could manipulate them into looking at a certain website, joining a certain group and voting for a certain candidate in elections.

So, the reality now is, companies like Facebook, Google and third parties of all kinds, have the power – and are using that power – to target your personal inner demons, to trigger you, and to take advantage of you when you’re at your weakest or most vulnerable to entice you into action that serves them, commercially or politically. It’s certainly something to keep in mind while you surf the web and social media sites.

“It was only a minute ago that we didn’t have many of these tools, and we were fine,” Zuboff says in the film.

He goes on, “We lived rich and full lives. We had close connections with friends and family. Having said that, I want to recognise that there’s a lot that the digital world brings to our lives, and we deserve to have all of that. But we deserve to have it without paying the price of surveillance capitalism.

“Right now, we are in that classic Faustian bargain; 21st century citizens should not have to make the choice of either going analogue or living in a world where our self-determination and our privacy are destroyed for the sake of this market logic. That is unacceptable.

“Let’s also not be naïve. You get the wrong people involved in our government, at any moment, and they look over their shoulders at the rich control possibilities offered by these new systems. There will come a time when, even in the West, even in our democratic societies, our government will be tempted to annex these capabilities and use them over us and against us. Let’s not be naïve about that.

“When we decide to resist surveillance capitalism – right now when it is in the market dynamic – we are also preserving our democratic future, and the kinds of checks and balances that we will need going forward in an information civilisation if we are to preserve freedom and democracy for another generation.”

But the surveillance and data collection doesn’t end with what you do online. Big Data also wants access to your most intimate moments – what you do and how you behave in the privacy of your own home, for example, or in your car. Zuboff recounts how the Google Nest security system was found to have a hidden microphone built into it that isn’t featured in any of the schematics for the device.

“Voices are what everybody are after, just like faces,” Zuboff says. 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.

She also discusses how these kinds of data-collecting devices force consent from users by holding the functionality of the device “hostage” if you don’t want your data collected and shared.

For example, Google’s Nest thermostats will collect data about your usage and share it with third parties, that share it with third parties and so on ad infinitum – and Google takes no responsibility for what any of these third parties might do with your data.

You can decline this data collection and third-party sharing, but if you do, Google will no longer support the functionality of the thermostat; it will no longer update your software and may affect the functionality of other linked devices such as smoke detectors.

Two scholars who analysed the Google Nest thermostat contract concluded that a consumer who is even a little bit vigilant about how their consumption data is being used would have to review 1,000 privacy contracts before installing a single thermostat in their home.

Modern cars are also being equipped with multiple cameras that feed Big Data. As noted in the film, the average new car has 15 cameras, and if you have access to the data of a mere one per cent of all cars, you have “knowledge of everything happening in the world.”

Of course, those cameras are sold to you as being integral to novel safety features, but you’re paying for this added safety with your privacy, and the privacy of everyone around you.

The current coronavirus pandemic is also using “safety” as a means to dismantle personal privacy. As reported by The New York Times, March 23, 2020:

“In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.

“In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analysing location data transmitted by citizens’ mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around “too much,” an official recently said.

“In Israel, the country’s internal security agency is poised to start using a cache of mobile phone location data – originally intended for counterterrorism operations – to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.

“As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians…Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say.

“Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition – technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas …

“’We could so easily end up in a situation where we empower local, state or federal government to take measures in response to this pandemic that fundamentally change the scope of American civil rights,’ said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a non-profit organization in Manhattan.”

Zuboff also discusses her work in a January 24, 2020, op-ed in The New York Times. “You are now remotely controlled. Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth,” she writes, continuing:

“We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us.

“We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that ‘privacy’ policies are actually surveillance policies … Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of … surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up — or that are secretly stolen from us.

“Our digital century was to have been democracy’s Golden Age. Instead, we enter its third decade marked by a stark new form of social inequality best understood as ‘epistemic inequality’… extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seize control of information and learning itself…

“Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself …

“Still, the winds appear to have finally shifted. A fragile new awareness is dawning … Surveillance capitalists are fast because they seek neither genuine consent nor consensus. They rely on psychic numbing and messages of inevitability to conjure the helplessness, resignation and confusion that paralyze their prey.

“Democracy is slow, and that’s a good thing. Its pace reflects the tens of millions of conversations that occur … gradually stirring the sleeping giant of democracy to action.

“These conversations are occurring now, and there are many indications that lawmakers are ready to join and to lead. This third decade is likely to decide our fate. Will we make the digital future better, or will it make us worse?”

Epistemic inequality refers to inequality in what you’re able to learn. “It is defined as unequal access to learning imposed by private commercial mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis and sales. It is best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us,” Zuboff writes in her New York Times op-ed.

• A Children’s Health Defence report /Originally published by Mercola