
Surveillance Capitalism - bottle2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
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dang
For a topic as well-covered as this
([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=comments%3E0%20Surveillance%20Capitalism&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none))
it would be better to submit something more specific than a Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia submissions are good for extremely obscure things.

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Hakashiro
My issue with the term is that governments are, and will ever be more invasive
with our private data than private companies. This makes sense: the government
will never be held accountable for data hoarding, and in fact kinda needs to
hoard data to prosecute tax fraud and ensure law enforcement, but private
businesses want to make sure people still use them, even if their users are
privacy conscious.

Moreover, a bunch of fully for-profit companies are living off of exclusively
selling privacy. Their only reason to exist is protecting their customer's
information. Think ProtonMail, Tutanota, TunnelBear, privacy.com, the Mozilla
Foundation (to a certain extent), Qwant, DuckDuckGo, and so on and so forth.

I very much preferred the previous term: "Government Surveillance". As some
other comments on this page also pointed out, this loss of privacy comes with
the benefit of productivity and reduced friction, while government
surveillance rarely ever has a positive side to it (except catching criminals,
and even so at the expense of non-criminals' privacy).

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encom
Key difference: You elect your government, and if you aren't happy with how
they're doing things, you can vote them out. I never voted for Zuckerberg,
Bezos, Cook or whoever runs Google.

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fbonetti
If you aren't happy with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc, you can choose
not to be a customer of them. You can't opt out of paying taxes.

~~~
encom
I'm not a customer of Google nor Facebook, but they're still tracking me all
over the internet.

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usr1106
Capitalism isn't seen as anything bad in most countries after the cold war.

I would prefer the term privacy prostitution or data prostitution. You sell
your privacy in exchange for getting "free" search, "free" news, "free" maps,
"free" email. Of course such services cannot be free of cost.

Traditionally Germany had a law that you are not allowed to give "gifts" when
selling something. So when offering a car they were not allowed to give a
"free" grill or something like that. The goal was to protect consumers from
intrasparent pricing and unfair business practices. Some market-liberalist
politicians abandoned the law many years ago, because consumers are "mature
enough" to make their own decisions.

So how many consumers decide to pay for the internet services they use instead
of being tracked?

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surround
> Capitalism isn't seen as anything bad in most countries after the cold war.

It’s called “surveillance capitalism” because companies are _capitalizing_ on
selling people’s data. It differentiates it from _government_ surveillance.

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Fnoord
In a corrupt (nation) state, you could for example buy some information about
a person, via the government. Corruptcy is not a black-white definition. There
are a lot of shades, wheels in a machine, etc. So a state is not merely
corrupt, yes or no.

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0x8BADF00D
I’d rather have surveillance capitalism than government
surveillance/authoritarianism. The worst thing these guys can do is try to
sell me a porn subscription I don’t need. Government surveillance is much
worse.

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pirocks
I can imagine a number of worse things that surveillance capitalists could do,
like sell services to the aforementioned governments, or sell your porn
subscription to someone else.

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bcaa7f3a8bbc
And practically, all the data collected by private corporations can be
obtained by governments via a subpoena. Until it could be changed, all
corporate surveillance is ultimately government surveillance. And there's
strong evidence suggests that it occurs at a routine basis. Although some
companies like Lavabit showed respectable efforts to be independent and
privacy-respecting, on the other hand, some companies actively cooperating
with the government, or even oppressive regimes without regards of ethics. So
yes, government surveillance is worse than corporate surveillance, but the
latter can be seriously harmful in many cases as well.

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netcan
The term "capitalism" is a mind-trap, vaguely encompassing everything..
carrying in political baggage but adda almost no actual information.

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mr_spothawk
well... in modern parlance perhaps.

but the word has a specific and precise definition despite peoples' ignorance
of it.

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Barrin92
I listened to the Econtalk episode with Zuboff and Roberts a while ago and I
wasn't really sold on her arguments despite actually being personally quite to
the left on economic issues usually.

The problem I had with the critique is that the answer to surveillance
capitalism always seems to be a return to privacy. Big Business is to big, we
need to claim data autonomy,be democratic, and so on.

I think the reason why surveillance capitalism is so successful is because
people actually like the automation and transparency. There's always this
"wake up sheeple" element to the critique that in my opinion just doesn't
address the fact that people simply value the utility they gain out of these
tools higher than privacy. I think the better way forward is to align the
interests of end consumers and business rather than attempting to retreat back
into private spaces.

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Fnoord
> I think the reason why surveillance capitalism is so successful is because
> people actually like the automation and transparency.

(I still have to read her book.)

They pay with their privacy, but the payment is not at all transparent. In a
way, it already happened: if you upgraded to Windows 10 for free back in the
days (before GDPR), you paid with your privacy. If you use Android instead of
iOS, you have a cheaper device, but you pay with your privacy. The Apple tax
is high in a lot of countries. Too high for the masses. In essence, an iOS
device is a status symbol that you paid with money instead of your privacy.

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Barrin92
>but you pay with your privacy

And I think that's a perfectly okay choice to make. I don't know why I
shouldn't pay with my information, given that I'm aware of it. I'm fine with
having an android phone and using the few hundred bucks I save on something
else.

My information has some value, and by trading that information to a company
that provides me with a service I get something out of it. If I keep data
private that I don't mind sharing and instead would say, pay with cash, I'd
lose out on getting some value out of my data.

Now I think there is an interesting discussion to be had if users could
organise to leverage the value they get out of their data, people have talked
about a sort of 'data union' to collectively bargain for a higher return, but
in principle I don't mind using my data as a currency.

