Surveillance  

Research

First source: “The goal is to automate us”

• Google decided that it would digitize and store every book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission.
• “it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission”.
• “Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet – Cannot not be done. 
• Google gathered more behavioral surplus data by getting the user’s secret information that they did not want shared. This helped them better predict their click patterns for targeted ads. 
• Surveillance capitalism started with advertising. 
• Every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant” is simply a supply-chain for predicting our futures.
• Digital surveillance is like Columbus discovering America. – claimed it.
• surveillance capitalism is not technology – it relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms 
• they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them.
• Breaking up the largest tech firms, will only create more surveillance capitalists competing with each other. 

Second Source: “What is Surveillance capitalism”

• Third party “data brokers” – buy information about certain people or groups, then collect more and sell it. 
• HealthEngine, a medical appointment booking app, was found to be sharing clients’ personal information with Perth lawyers particularly interested in workplace injuries or vehicle accidents.
• Currently, the biggest “Big Other” actors are Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple
• -wearables collected data through cameras, sensors, tracking health and activities. 

Third Source: “Surveillance apathy is a problem”

• According to a major 2017 privacy survey, around 70% of us are more concerned about privacy than we were five years ago.
• Surveillance apathy can be linked to people’s dependence on “the system”.
• Search engines such as DuckDuckGo or Tor Browser allow users to browse without being tracked. Lightbeam, meanwhile, allows users to see how their information is being tracked by third party companies. And MIT devised a system to show people the metadata of their emails, called Immersion.

With all this research in mind, my biggest concerns with surveillance are surrounding who owns the rights to our data and the laws set in place to control that data. All of this technology surrounding the internet is so recent, it is scary how it is developing quicker than laws can develop to control it. Because of this, lots of big companies with enough money to have a large amount of power, are in possession of our data, and our able to, or at least attempting to manipulate aspects of our daily lives.

I do believe we can make changes happen in order to regain some privacy and security within these technologies. I think the first step is for the government to set standards for these companies which focuses on human rights and breaks down their policies to the moral violations they are accountable of, and changes them so it’s in the best interest of peoples health and not in the interest of an individuals self gain.

The biggest change I would make to most apps, or websites which ask for your permission before accessing your data, is to require a less cryptic terms of service, perhaps even something which has to state in bold, like a health warning, that states all the potential data this company can access, and everything they can do with said data. I think it would also be important to limit the internet usage for children. I am aware of all the benefits, and also all the people trying to do this already, but I think if we can find some new forms of technology to help kids learn without being connected to the internet, it could really benefit them and their knowledge of how the internet and data work in the long run.