In an age where the right to privacy continues to be relegated to an antiquated notion, whether it’s governments spying on it’s citizens or corporations watching your every move, our lives seem forever compromised.
Surveillance Capitalism is defined as:
An economic system centered around the capture and commodification of personal data for purpose of profit.
Google and You Tube are two of the most egregious examples of this ever growing, unconstitutional practice. I’m sure you’ve all noticed after checking the results of your favorite football team a few times a week, like some amazing marketing magic trick, advertisements for tickets to sporting events begin appearing everywhere (Brookings.edu).
The Chinese government has taken surveillance and spying on it’s people to new, unimaginable heights. Besides the daily practice of weeding out perceived threats to the Authoritarian Superstate by Uyghur minorities, China is now implementing a facial recognition program just for it’s “loyal” citizens to enter or exit their apartment complexes.
According to NPR.com, in 2018, People’s Daily which serves as a mouthpiece for the Communist Party stated that the government had the ability to facially scan 1.4 billion of it’s citizens in mere seconds.
But are we not to expect this paranoia from the Authoritarian, Communist Superstate in the Far East? So obsessed with dissent and secret Anti Socialist entities that most citizens wouldn’t have the gumption to cross that red line. But for those that do have the courage the Chinese government has such modern technology and vast amounts of Surveillance systems it’s becoming extremely difficult to get away with. China’s surveillance program has nothing to do with making a profit, as we’ll find out, compared to their ideological rival the United States.
Since there are no federal privacy laws regulating most companies, this grants them free reign to gather as much data as they wish and practically do what they please with that information. If you’re familiar with George Orwell’s Uber classic novella “1984” you’d realize that fictional account of the Future and Orwell’s idea of what a Surveillance state would look like you’d ascertain that Orwell may well had been somewhat of a clairvoyant.
Governments around the world are consistently purchasing sophisticated technology of their citizens behavior on social media. And why would wouldn’t they? Billions of people all over the planet use some form of social media daily, so what better way to “check” in on their lives then manipulating these sites? Obtaining your hobbies and interests to sell them on their version of the “Capitalist dark web” to the highest bidder, not too mention using it for their own financial gain. Who would have thought a guy like Mark Zuckerberg could’ve been so untrustworthy (info courtesy of freedomhouse.org)?
American author, Harvard professor and social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff’s 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism she presented it as a “radically imbedded and extractive variant of information Capitalism” based on the commodification of “reality” and it’s transformation into the behavioral data for analysis and sales. In a 2015 follow up, Zuboff evaluated the societal intimations of the transfiguration of Capitalism.
As stated by Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism was pioneered by Google and later Facebook, in much the same way mass production and managerial capitalism were developed by Ford and General Motors a century before, and now has become a dominant form of information capitalism (theintercept.com).
We as Americans have basically come to the resignation that our country is the epitome of the best and most certainly the worst aspects of ultra capitalism. The scourge of mass commercialization, price gouging, low wages, unfair class systems and now Surveillance Capitalism. Are we ever safe from the immense reach of corporations and their slimy tentacles? Not on the street and now most definitely in our bedrooms surfing the web.
It’s impossible to ignore, the signs are everywhere you look. Our internet search history is permanently compromised as I mentioned earlier and there’s only a few different resources you can attempt to give you your safety and privacy back. One of those avenues are VPNs which stands for “virtual private network”- a service that helps you stay private online. VPN establishes a secure, encrypted connection between your computer and the internet, providing a private tunnel for your data and communications while using public networks ( avast.com).
It’s seems the war on privacy is heating up, companies are not going down without a fight as having such an ability to infiltrate citizen’s personal information is like a marketing gold mine. Other companies will try to invent software, i.e VPN networks too help the consumer combat the ones dead set on gaining whatever knowledge made available to them through social media selling your data or obtaining it from search engines like Google.
I don’t have the answer to rectify this dangerous, unseemly practice by these corporate entities. Sadly, due to the wreckage of the United States economy and the coming recession, something like Surveillance Capitalism and how unconstitutionally devious it is will land on the proverbial back burner and I’m positive that’s no accident.
Another great site by the Dangerous Globe
