My Data, But Not My Rules
Shoshana Zuboff in her book ‘Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ as well as many newspaper articles and research journals has been critical of the logic of data accumulation by Google, Facebook, and other tech-based companies. Her works talk about how in our lives, everything that we see is a product of an attempt by businesses to understand and modify our behavior to sell things to us. Salesmanship and capitalism have taken on new forms which have now become more exploitative than ever. As Zuboff believes, capitalism used to depend on factors such as labour, land, and human intelligence to proud goods/services for humanity. Now, it has begun to feed on human experience to understand human behavior by implementing surveillance techniques that have never been heard of before. Everything that a human being does, searches for on Google, like/dislike on Google, becomes raw material for generating targeted advertisements and eventually hacking our brains into believing anything they want.
Yuval Noah Harari explains the concept of free will and how it is gradually becoming meaningless. As more data gets accumulated with governments and corporations, they will eventually know people better than they know themselves. This will give them an upper hand in influencing and hacking the brains of human beings. Many studies and surveys have been conducted over the years aimed at understanding the levels of awareness among customers about keeping their data private and safe. Businesses have been held accountable and rightly punished by governments for breaking the laws, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg was questioned in the U.S. Congress over Facebook’s data policy in 2018. The world has even seen whistle blowers such as Edward Snowden uncovering the dirty surveillance practices of government agencies. But somewhere there is still a lack of awareness and understanding, especially in third-world countries about mass surveillance. Data collection is the business model for thousands of businesses, but its misuse is something that needs more attention as over half of the world’s population has access to the internet. Just thinking about the amount of data that is available for use (rather misuse), is horrifying.
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