You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation

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While I found Shoshana Zuboff’s book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” to be completely unreadable, this opinion piece by her published in the NYT was readable, thought-provoking and made a lot of sense to me. The NYT is behind a paywall for me but the article is freely available at:
https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3304821/shoshana-zuboff/you-are-object-secret-extraction-operation

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Steve, Microfix, RockE, SueW, AlphaCharlie, OscarCP, Mele20

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Thank you for the link and thanks for making AskWoody users better informed. The NYTimes is behind a paywall for me also. They should make this article available to everyone. It is THAT important an article. It is very thought provoking and ALL Americans should read it.

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samak

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thank you @samak, worthy of a frontpage blogpost and not ONLY americanos either it’s global.

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Microfix

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I think that rather than “surveillance”, a better word is “unbridled.” The idea of globalization as the way to a brilliant future — for some — and the neoliberal economic dogmatism, are at the root of the way of thinking that leads to things such as those criticized in the article.

Milton Freedman and his Chicago Boys have a lot to answer for, the way they have influenced events in the world over the last fifty years. Because of this way of thinking widely shared by government leaders, democratic societies have been, so far, unable to come to terms with these problems and put a stop to them, recognizing this ideology as the root cause of the existence of deficient legal systems that make possible such systematic and blatant trespasses of people’s privacy, as well as the deliberate distortion of the civilized and informed discourse essential to the thriving of democratic societies. So all of it is now perfectly legal, or in a broad grey zone between legal and illegal.

But I am not sure this thread is in the best forum for discussing this kind of topic and perhaps some MVP could move it to some other forum that is more appropriate?

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Thank you  albeit Shocking!

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Until today (starting programming in 1968) I don’t understand how Facebook, Google..make money from “Surveillance” or ads. None sees a penny out of me.
Do people really click on ads ? run to the shop to buy something after a tv commercial ? Let Google record every move people make while using Google Maps / Waze ?

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Alex5723 wrote:

None sees a penny out of me.

I think they can make plenty of pennies out of your information by selling it to other people. Take Cambridge Analytica as an example. Wouldn’t all those data points be perceived by them as potentially useful and therefore they would be willing to pay for it ? Whether they could then do anything useful with that info is not the point, the data harvesters have already made their money by selling it to them.

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OscarCP

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I’ve never, I mean never, clicked on an ad knowingly.

Part of it is the bug repellant theory: If 99% of a swarm of mosquitos numbering one million is repelled, 10,000 still bite.

Cambridge Analytica distributed personality tests.  People love personality tests and pretty much give away everything about themselves completing the test.  Valuable info to increase efficiency of political targeting.  Interesting how they got access to so many users from FB; back room deals help a lot too, so much for sophistication.

Lots of other uses, companies pay for data that serves their markets vs. the bug repellant method.  Remember cascading popups? OMG, pull the power cord!

Money circling at levels above users that users never see.

I’m fairly useless to advertisers.  I have disparate interests and always score smack dab in the middle of personality tests.

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SallyBrown: “Cambridge Analytica distributed personality tests. People love personality tests and pretty much give away everything about themselves completing the test.”

So the decisive factor here is that many people are too trusting, too uninformed and too naïve?

I am somewhat trusting, often naïve and inevitably uninformed about many things, but have never paid attention in person, or online, have clicked on ads other than by mistake. I sort of profoundly distrust ads, except for classified ones, and only when I am looking for something very special and necessary (a new place to live in, for example).

Once, with a cousin who had never been there, we did a tour of New York. When, walking around, we found ourselves in Madison Avenue, I told him: “In all these buildings around us are the offices of people that lie for a living.” (Not so much these days, but never let reality spoil a good quip.)

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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samak wrote:

Alex5723 wrote:

None sees a penny out of me.

I think they can make plenty of pennies out of your information by selling it to other people. Take Cambridge Analytica as an example. Wouldn’t all those data points be perceived by them as potentially useful and therefore they would be willing to pay for it ? Whether they could then do anything useful with that info is not the point, the data harvesters have already made their money by selling it to them.

Why would they pay for something that can’t be (in my and many other cases) monetized ?

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Because they are not paying for Alex’s information, they are paying for millions of people’s information. The scattergun approach – if 10% of those millions can be monetized then it is worth serious money. Whether Alex is in that 10% or not isn’t of any concern.

And if they can’t make any money out of your information, maybe they can in turn sell it to someone else to try.

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Yup. That’s the whole point. That’s the business model. Facebook, Google and others have turned people’s personal information, pictures and data into a marketable commodity; and they knew that that’s what they were doing right from the beginning. Google has  a data base of pictures of hundreds of millions of people, every picture that those people ever made public on any social media platform has been captured and saved by Google (just try getting them to delete one). Too late. It was once public and now it’s in Google’s database forever. People need to understand that they are the product, not the customer, on social media; their personal information, pictures, data and preferences are being harvested and sold to anyone willing to pay for it. And like you say, even if only 10% of it generates any return, it’s worth it to them. All that talk about fostering communication and connecting people to friends and loved ones and providing a public service for people to communicate with each other is a ruse. It is and always has been just a way to harvest all that data.

 

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aka internet pick-pockets!
Outside the ‘digital arena’ that’s a criminal offence so my question is:
Why should it be any different within the ‘digital arena’???

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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DrBonzo

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Follow the money. And this works no matter what side of the ponds you’re on!

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Microfix

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Microfix: “aka internet pick-pockets!
Outside the ‘digital arena’ that’s a criminal offence so my question is:
Why should it be any different within the ‘digital arena’???”

Because, for the reason I mentioned in my first comment in this tread, there is no law against doing this in the digital arena — at lest in the USA. If it is not defined by law as a crime (with an act, precedent, regulation, etc.) then it is not a crime. It might be morally repellent, but it’s entirely legal.

Welcome to the wonderfully wild world we now live in, a world that did not start to be so just yesterday at midnight. Send your thanks to the ghost of Milton Friedman and to the people who make our magnificent laws. Don’t forget also to thank Silicon Valley’s denizens and their alumnus!

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Facebook and Google “listening” is more pervasive than you think

…Everyone was gathered around the dining room table, having a grand time. One of the kids brought out a new product she uses at her salon. My mother-in-law, being a stylist herself, asked me to look up the price for the product, so I snatched up my phone and commenced to look it up. With the task complete, I put down my phone and didn’t think twice about it.

The next morning, my mother-in-law found herself quite disturbed when she opened Facebook on her Samsung Galaxy phone to see an advertisement for that very product in her feed. At breakfast, she was convinced either (both?) Facebook or Google was listening to her the previous night. After all, how would either have known she was curious about the product? She didn’t search for it on her phone…

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