The Business of Surveillance Capitalism – Privacy, Autonomy and the Realism of Balance

On Surveillance Capitalism

I will start with a story.

Sometime this year, a friend made a post on WhatsApp about Barrack Obama's favourite reads in 2019. I had seen the ex-President's original post in passing (on Twitter) but only really took note of it after my friend's post. In that remarkable list of books was “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Shoshana Zuboff. Now, interestingly, I had read Shoshana Zubboff’s book as well as a number of her publications as part of my research for a thesis proposal, and it thrilled me to see that I read a book in common with Barack Obama the past year. In my enthusiasm, I told my friend that I had read one of the books on the list and mentioned Shoshana’s work to him. He asked if it was a good book and I told him it was, enthusing, as I tend to do. After my inadvertent evangelism, he requested that I shared the book with him. As I did not have a soft copy handy, I searched for it on Google, downloaded it and shared with him. The next morning, I opened Youtube, and several Shoshana Zuboff interviews on Surveillance Capitalism were indiscriminately plastered on my recommended list. I laughed at the irony, and binge-watched the interviews, after making a mental note to write this article. This is not a lone example of my experiences of what Shoshana Zuboff aptly termed “Surveillance Capitalism” but it stands out for its sheer irony – it was “Surveillance Capitalism” at play on the subject of “Surveillance Capitalism.”

Shoshana defines Surveillance Capitalism interestingly. She calls it the process of commodifying personal data for profit-making. To put it plainly, it is anything done by businesses on the internet to ensure that information on human behavior is captured, used and translated into profit – something which is aggressively becoming common place today.

One of the most common place of these activities is targeted advertisements made possible through data mining and predictive algorithms; so that Surveillance Capitalism is what happens when you search on Google for therapies for dealing with pregnancy pains in the first trimester and Jumia begins to advertise baby clothes to you so soon thereafter or what happens when you search for a house to rent on google and your Instagram feed begins to bubble with adverts from housing agencies.?

Which isn’t such a terrible thing on the surface, to be honest. It should pass for an innovative use of technology to provide utility and convenience in exchange for profit. That is, until you take a closer look.

The process behind targeted advertising, for example, is an easy reveal.?While you search on Google for whatever you are searching for, your data (personal data and behavioural data) is mined without your knowledge, and shared with other platforms (either directly or indirectly), for the purpose of targeted adverts.

With this example alone, there are already three unsettling facts;

first, the fact that you are “monitored” while you use the internet;

second, the fact that your data is stored without your knowledge or express permission, and;

third, the fact that your data/online footprint is shared without your knowledge or express permission.

While many have written on the subject of data use by companies on the internet and the intense commercialization of human data that has come to characterize the digital economy, especially by the Big Corp (Google, Facebook, Amazon etc), few have been as critical as Zuboff.

Shoshana’s critique of “Surveillance Capitalism” are as scathing as they are intriguing. She remarks that it is a market driven process where the commodity for sale is personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance of the internet made possible through a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history.

It is a whole lot to take in, so I will summarise. The point is, she believes that the indiscriminate and illicit monitoring of human activity, the clandestine mining of personal data and the commercialization of this data, activities which she argues constitute Surveillance Capitalism, are wrong and ought to be regulated. She believes these activities engender a bad capitalist model and she argues that human data is not commodity. In many ways, it is hard to argue with her. The problem though, in my opinion, is not so much the Capitalism as it is the Surveillance; not so much the commercialization of data as it is the indiscriminate monitoring and mining. Capitalism is never really the problem – it has proven to be a reliable menace over the years, perpetually stuck between near combustion and remarkable self-regulation, dancing every erratically to the tune of the market forces. The fact of commercialized surveillance, however, is a much more unnatural problem?and the issues with it range from the fact that it infringes on the privacy of individuals, to the fact that it opens individuals to inordinate personal data exploitation. And that is not all.

The business models which Shoshana call Surveillance Capitalism have been said to often use personal data as a means of ‘controlling’ consumption behaviors through machine learning and algorithms which utilise behavourial data and curated content to herd customers into a pre-determined awareness likely to convert into purchases/profit. A common example of this is with behavioral ads which target customers with products based on their behaviors online.?

It can be as little as the consistent footballing boot adverts that keep popping up after you saw a Youtube video on why Ronaldo wears two different boot sizes, which eventually lead you to buy a footballing boot, or some other random advert of something you never searched for, which you eventually buy because you begin to feel you need it, the sense of which ties to an awareness put there through the adverts, and the idea for which is captured from related things you have purchased on Amazon before.

This has been referred to as behavioral modification and points to an even more problematic issue; the issue of personal autonomy and free will.

Data Privacy and Personal Autonomy

The crux of the issue is data privacy and personal autonomy. Data Privacy is the right of an individual to have control over how their personal information is collected and used. The concept of Data Privacy is a legal creation – a legal right which humans enjoy (and the reason why you can compel a stranger on the bus to stop staring at your screen). In most countries, privacy is a fundamental right and can be enforced against any person who infringes on it in a Court. Personal Autonomy on the other hand refers to our rights as individuals to act by our own design and for our own sake, without external coercion.

Of the various Fundamental Rights, data privacy is a relatively underemphasized right. Until recently, it was a relatively casual right which required little enforcement since it could be managed by the individual without need for reference to Law.

Until the internet, if you wanted to enforce your right to privacy, all you need do is find a box to lock up the letter your wrote or lock your windows so your curious neighbors see nothing and all the law really was, in the context of privacy, was a sidebar in a self-regulating environment. At worse, individuals directly sued transgressors for breach of their privacy and few privacy cases were recorded in the law reports. The disruption of technology and the internet changed all this. Today, shutting your window is no longer enough – closing your browser or shutting down your computer isn’t either. The new pervasiveness of information, the over abundance of personal data and the attendant tendency of misuse made especially possible by the lax nature of privacy law in most legal systems summarizes the current issues.?

On the other hand, Personal Autonomy, in the context of commerce, had never really provided much of a concern. Until the internet, the only way you would act against your own wish was if you were compelled by force or swindled – and both were crimes. Today, with the internet, the human consciousness is easily fluid and anyone with the right channels can affect it and compel behavior. This new possibility may have opened a new market angle for corporations who have the means to access and perhaps manipulate the increasingly reactive human consciousness for profit.

On the Question of Balance

Everything so far segues me into the real conversation, the conversation around compromise - between comfort and privacy, between utility and personal autonomy, between convenience and control.?At the end of the day, to make any categorical statements about what ought be done about the problems posed by Surveillance Capitalism is to make a decision cutting across law, technology and several aspects of modern life. We know that Surveillance Capitalism raises issues, but there is the sense that any rash conclusion about what should be done about these issues may see us throw the child with the bathwater. This is where the real conversation is.

Yes, YouTube putting me up with videos of Shoshana Zuboff’s interviews is Surveillance Capitalism at work, but it was a much appreciated one. In fact, I can say that a majority of the utilities I have enjoyed online, which I know fully well are completely resultant of "Surveillance Capitalism", I have appreciated deeply (albeit, sometimes with a sense of discomfort like when adverts of houses in *****?kept popping up on my Instagram and these are houses for sale, not houses for rent like I very clearly instructed Google).

For all its atrocities; Surveillance Capitalism has some benefits - comfort, utility, convenience, information etc. I recently started following Basketball. I started with watching a number of videos online on superstars like Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, Lebron James, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neil, Kobe Bryant etc. and then Google took it upon itself to start notifying me of NBA matches and giving me reports on scores after every match (and now I support the Huston Rockets.)

What this means then is that, to fix the problems associated with Surveillance Capitalism, “cancelling Surveillance Capitalism” may not be the answer (not like that is even possible); but balance might be. To fix the issues associated with Surveillance Capitalism, the excesses of these business models, which stem from a limitlessness of power, need to be curbed. To achieve balance, we need better regulation of the activities that constitute "Surveillance Capitalism" on one hand, and maybe a bit of compromise, on some privacy standards.

So, what we need is more Laws and less rights??

It does not sound ideal of course, but it would work. Ultimately, there isn't so much else that can be done. Already, the original model of enforcement of the right to privacy has since been rendered ineffective by Big Business and the Internet. At this point, the individual has absolutely no control of anything. More so, there is nothing the individual can do about the matter of personal autonomy. If anything is to be done, it bodes on the State.

Many Governments have indeed taken this hint and have sprung to actions to limit the excesses of Companies and Corporations in their dealings with human data, with regulations like the EU GDPR triggering reactions from Governments around the world in response to an increasingly complex issue. Nigeria, recently embarked on its own response project, with the NDPR which was recently released providing a much needed data protection framework for Africa’s biggest economy. With these regulations, the privacy rights of individuals are reemphasized and the duty to protect these rights are also placed on Businesses and Corporations (rather than squarely on the individual) who are now compelled to ensure they do not compromise data privacy in their activities or risk regulatory sanction in addition to private legal enforcement. These laws also slightly adjust the prior standard of privacy so as not to completely deny Businesses and Corporations the use of personal data and instead limit their usage of personal data to only be within acceptable lawful and legitimate scopes.

And so, the problem is solved. Right? Only it is not. While data protection laws are welcome improvements, they are simply is not enough. The excesses of Surveillance Capitalism cannot be completely fixed by reactionary regulations on data privacy, which, speaking pragmatically, mostly create normative standards. As mentioned earlier, the issue with Surveillance Capitalism, (and I disagree with the left-winged argument on this) is majorly the fact of surveillance. Current data protection laws do not solve the problem of surveillance as they directly apply to collection of personal data. They do not speak to activities which constitute unlawful monitoring and mining of human data or exploitation of data footprints both on the internet and through mobile devices (such as location and photos etc.) and the wrongful use or sharing of these. In addition to Data Protection laws, regulations around illicit extraction, mining, exploitation and use of human data (not limited to personal identifiable data which most data protection laws cover) should be put in place. There should be a structure around how much personal behavioral data businesses and Big Tech should be allowed to extract from digital activities, how they can use it, and how they can or cannot transfer it. On this, Cookie notice obligations are a good starting point and most Data Protection laws already contemplate these, but they are not enough.

Cookie obligations only compel Companies to seek consent (which people give without reading the fine print) for use of cookies which extract data from activities of websites. They don’t control how Companies use, store or share these data. Many Companies don't bother with cookie obligations also, and would go ahead to extract data with or without cookie consent.

These proposed regulations, (which would obviously be written by people with an understanding of the workings of predictive algorithm, data mining and analytics as well as legal policy and regulation) would need to find the balance between utility and intrusion on all our behalf. At the very least, there should be a clearly identified line between what is acceptable Surveillance, if at all, and what is not.

Also, as much as Capitalism is not the problem, there need be a clear definition of how corporations can exploit data and what qualifies as acceptable use of predictive algorithms. For example, there needs be provisions distinguishing choice architecture from behavioral modification and allowing for the former as against the latter (with the former being the use of computer enabled mathematical calculations to present customers with choices which they can find useful?and the other being the deliberate attempt to not merely predict consumer behavior using data, but to control it).

While choice architecture is logically acceptable and business prudent, with its commendable implications for business and commerce making it the new face of marketing today, behavourial modification is the darker brother; the illicit duex ex machina (hand of god) compelling human behavior for profit, which would only lead to problems for society.

Conclusion

There is a sense of panic that accompanies every new significant advancement in technology. The internet, for instance (which like most avant garde technology has greatly changed the world for the better) was treated with great suspicion and fear in its infancy (in some ways, it still is).?Today it has become so essential that we can barely imagine life without it (I would not be writing this article without it).

There is that sense then, that the reaction to the more recent data mining and exploitations tactics of businesses and Big Tech are not as bad as they may have been made out to be. This could be true to some extent. For one thing, some of the “evils” of Surveillance Capitalism as considered by some analysts are slightly exaggerated and some perspectives on its implications seem straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, while some of its benefits are purposely under-emphasized.?It begins to sound unnecessarily apocalyptical.

That said, the novel problems posed by Surveillance Capitalism in the face of the current proliferation of data and the current business incentive to misuse data cannot be understated and must be address as quickly as possible. It may well be impossible to reach a state of perfect control over the activities of businesses on the internet or on the activities around human data on the internet (it is unclear if that would even be a good thing if it could be achieved), but it is possible to create a higher standard and a safer data environment for all. This then, is what we ought to aim for at the very least, especially as technology continues to drive the world into even more unpredictable unknowns.