
The price of connection: 'surveillance capitalism' - walterbell
http://theconversation.com/the-price-of-connection-surveillance-capitalism-64124
======
walterbell
Shoshana Zuboff (retired Harvard prof) is writing a book on this topic, due
next year. She spoke at a 2014 conference,
[http://davidcharles.info/2014/10/shoshana-zuboff-reality-
nex...](http://davidcharles.info/2014/10/shoshana-zuboff-reality-next-big-
thing/)

 _" If the people are not Google’s customers and they are not Google’s
employees, then what does Google need people for? Only one thing: data. “Data
is becoming everything,” Shoshana says. “The ugly truth here is that this so
called ‘big data’ is plucked from our lives without our knowledge and without
our informed consent.” This big data, which Shoshana calls ‘big contraband’ or
‘big stolen goods’, is sucked from our social media, from our smartphones,
from our every networked click, type and touch ... "In the shadow of the dark
Google, it has become fashionable to mourn the passing of democracy,” Shoshana
concludes. “But if we leave behind democracy, we leave behind the best part of
ourselves.”_

24 min video: [https://vimeo.com/110222526](https://vimeo.com/110222526)

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anexprogrammer
"It’s puzzling we are not already more angry about this transformation"

I don't think it is. We are the 1% who understand tech enough to make a
rational choice of which services to use or avoid, use a VPN, ublock etc to
lessen our exposure to personally acceptable levels. We're aware that some
tracking goes on fingerprinting. The article seems to be written by the 1% for
the 1%. The people who read these sorts of articles and have read enough to
know the basics of tracking, retargeting, bubbling, IoT, surveillance, Snowden
etc.

For the rest, and I include nearly all "tech natives" like our kid's
generation, and plenty who should know better, if an app get's mentioned it's
installed and the permissions OK'd, then they run it, _now_ they wonder what
it is and if it's any good. If you try and increase awareness they're about as
interested as they were in maths lessons (or whatever your most hated thing
was). When Snowden was fresh and being discussed it was "but terrorists", "but
safety" and "I don't care if NSA read my pizza orders and stupid texts".
Completely missing the point then.

Their idea of a complex password is usually laughable going on friends and
family tech support. No amount of hinting gets it acceptable, or willing to
use a manager.

IoT is cute light bulbs, smart baby monitors and neat gadgets. No realisation
that the security of most is shit, that a surprising amount of cams are
online, or what it means to put something on the network.

The transformation isn't realised. The implications aren't either. Most
people's _only_ awareness of bubble effects is wondering why they've seen no
FB posts from their sister in ages (Edgerank decided they weren't worthy).
There's _no_ awareness of it in search, or news, or youtube and assume, no
matter how skewed their results are, that what they see is the "truth". If
there's a bubble effect for extremist and conspiracy theorists too, we should
maybe be concerned.

I gave up even trying to educate on this stuff.

"What’s needed is more collective reflection on the costs of capitalism’s new
data relations for our very possibilities of ethical life."

Apart from asking isn't it too late already? How can we have a collective
reflection when effectively no one is aware of the issues or problems?

~~~
deltaprotocol
This is why I believe we are the root cause. We, developers and tech aware.
Your mentioned 1%.

This isn't about agencies or governments or even corporations anymore. It's
about our work ethics. Developer ethics.

We babble around the internet about all the things we defend, but we don't
even try not to embed Analytics in our clients websites.

We fear for the future, for the abuse of the technological systems, yet those
under the dark robe of the NSA and others are readers of this same vehicle.
They are here.

People call RMS radical and so many other things, but isn't history proving
him right in many of his deviations? Heading for total disaster, yes we are.

We, the ones who built and delivered computers and the internet to the world,
are doing a job for corporations and not for users. If you're paid, you put
your tail between your legs and comply.

This is about changing our developer attitude, our developer community. Maybe
only we understand the battlefield, but still the fight is our hands now. We
must protect those we love and those we have never met. We must stand up and
fight the fight for them, just the way we expect a doctor to have built the
knowledge and to act ethically when taking care of us, just like we expect a
civil engineer to build stuff with quality and respect for our well being, we
must also act honorably like that, even if it means we loose money.

The developer community, hidden behind screens, have been bought by the big
man money, and act to the people as blind policemen throwing bombs at the
demanding population.

~~~
anexprogrammer
I think you're right, on all points, but that leaves us deeply screwed.

I can try to dissuade my boss from putting in the 33rd analytics gizmo on our
site, but they are remembering the sales pitch and all that lovely data. If I
say no they'll ask someone else in the office, few more times I'll be needing
a new job.

It's interesting you mention doctors and engineers, two professions that have
more accountability and two well subscribed professional bodies. If doctors
were being asked to surveil patients or report something, as governments will
occasionally suggest, the BMA will shout rather loudly. The press listen,
write up a piece with suitably scary headline, and the govt changes mind
(usually).

The IET (UK Engineering body) has double the global membership of the BCS
(computing) which is in far more countries. I'm going to hazard a guess
there's more in tech than engineering.

I'm not aware of any tech or professional bodies that attract anything but a
tiny minority. We can't blacken the web like the Googles and Facebooks can in
the face of stupidity like SOPA. Without some group body we're left with
signing change.org and blogging. If we don't take a job there's millions who
will - FB and Google are in the top 5 best places to work, yet are part of the
problem.

~~~
erlehmann_
> I can try to dissuade my boss from putting in the 33rd analytics gizmo on
> our site, but they are remembering the sales pitch and all that lovely data.
> If I say no they'll ask someone else in the office, few more times I'll be
> needing a new job.

If someone does something morally wrong, it is not made morally acceptable by
the possibility that someone else might have done it. Justifications that use
the kind of reasoning “If I had not done it, someone else would have done it.”
come most often from people who might lose something (or not gain something)
from doing the morally acceptable thing. I suspect it is just selfishness that
makes people cling to such justifications, no matter how weak those are.

------
erlehmann_
Before I started my current job as a programmer, I made it clear that I do not
want to work on unsolicited advertising, surveillance or weapons technologies
– the common reason being that I value enthusiastic user consent. Being hired
by a company after having stated these preferences makes me confident that I
will not be asked to work on anything of the above.

The “enthusiastic” bit is the important part: When a user browses a web site,
that user does not enthusiasticly consent to being profiled for marketing
activities. Whereas: When someone answers a questionaire about consumer
behavior to get a bargain or collects points for a customer loyalty program,
then you have explicit and unambiguous consent.

Besides being explicit, consent should be given freely. An ultimatum (like “If
you do not accept the new privacy guidelines, you will never be able to see
your family photos again.”) does not result in freely given consent.

When I interact with non-free software or “social networking” web pages I
often notice dialogs that remind me of how really pushy people behave. If I
ever come across a person that creates these kinds of dialogs that do not give
users a real choice about what is happening, I might just ask them if I should
hit them in the face “now” or “later” just to see what happens.

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jchrisa
""" Like Kant, Hegel believed that the greatest good was free will, but he
went further in clarifying what freedom might involve. For Hegel, freedom is
impossible without the self having some space of autonomy where it can be in a
reflective relation with itself. As he put it:

… freedom is this: to be with oneself in the other. Here the self is not
isolated, but endlessly being mediated through the world: the world of other
things and people, and of its past self and actions. But it can be free if it
comes to grasp such processes as its own – related to its goals and not those
of others. It is just this that becomes harder to sustain under surveillance
capitalism. """

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contingencies
Ironic that they have Google Maps on their website
[http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/](http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/) .. I
guess they're fine with identifying all of their users' political persuasion.

