Talk:Surveillance capitalism

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 September 2020 and 25 October 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kheine.

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Coined or used/popularized?
As of right now the article says: "Surveillance capitalism is a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff..."

But can it actually be said that she "coined" the term? According to Google Trends the term has been used since at least 2006 and I found this source from 2001 for instance which used the term as well, albeit with it referring to the military-intelligence-surveillance-industrial-complex:

"Paid for with public “contract” resources, the observation technology is used to advance global surveillance, the long term consequences of which include an impact on Canadian sovereignty and the continued growth of “surveillance capitalism” or the “surveillance state”, depending on where emphasis is placed."

I'm not sure what the first usage of the term in at least roughly the way Zuboff means it was and whether her first using the term in that sense warrant the word "coined" here.

For instance the article could say: "Surveillance capitalism is a term used and popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff..."

or "Surveillance capitalism is a concept introduced by academic Shoshana Zuboff..."

etc.

What would you suggest?

--Fixuture (talk) 12:52, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that the etymology is over emphasized in the article. This article is not about the term, but about the concept behind the term. The academic's name can be taken out of the lead for coining the term, or at least, if that academic is mentioned, then their greater contribution is in developing the concept and not a dubious claim to originating it.
 * Obviously the origin of the concept is in the companies who used it as a business model. For unclear terms like this, having an etymology section opens the article to include other terms for the same thing. For example, Google internal documents must have called this something, and Facebook documents probably called it something else. Other information not explicitly called "surveillance capitalism" has a place in this article. It is really use to have an academic name and define the concept as a frame for what sort of information should be included.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  15:16, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
 * How about 'Commodification of personal data' for the broader term. The following three academic articles use approximately the similar terms. 1, 2, 3 Jonpatterns (talk) 20:03, 14 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Good findings. Imo 'commodification of data' would make a good second article or potential new sections in commodification and information economy. "Surveillance capitalism" denotes the integration of new surveillance technologies (/ potentials) into the context of capitalism and in that the "privacy-relevant capitalism-characteristic commodification of personal data and active surveillance with profit motives". This page probably should be linked from any such new article and/or section/s. --Fixuture (talk) 14:13, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The article is about surveillance capitalism, not primarily about Zuboff. I also added a section below. Could you concentrate a bit to make the article understandable? At the moment, I would rather consider it for deletion in its current form unless it follows a bit more the encyclopedia-style and not so much advertise the great ideas of Zuboff, which is of minor importance here and therefore should only be mentioned below the table of contents SebastianHellmann (talk) 06:28, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

See Alternative data.
Please look at Alternative data. Is that the same thing, from a different ideological viewpoint? Both articles are orphans. Merge? This content seems useful but misplaced. Merging into Big data would make sense, but that article is already too crowded. This belongs somewhere in the finance space, but where? John Nagle (talk) 19:49, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

First paragraph uninformative
Surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation that was popularised in a 2014 essay by business theorist and social scientist Shoshana Zuboff. She characterized it as a "radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.


 * While the article itself seems to be written by fans of Shoshana Zuboff, I see some value in it. However, the first paragraph is quite uninformative and unencyclopaediac. Personally, I don't care so much about Zuboff, I would like to understand Surveillance Capitalism. I would very much appreciate it, if somebody could fix this and stick to MOS:BEGINNING.
 * I read most of the article and still have no good information what this thing actually is. The point of having a Wikipedia article is in my opinion that readers can get a good idea about something without reading Zuboff's articles and books. SebastianHellmann (talk) 06:23, 18 March 2019 (UTC)


 * I agree the article is too based around Zuboff. I've started to rewrite the lede and restructure the article. Jonpatterns (talk) 19:35, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Intersection with Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance?
--94.142.77.80 (talk) 05:09, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Datafication: The trend to turn technology-mediated human behaviour and interaction into data which is subsequently realised as a new form of value.
 * Dataism: The ideological/philosophical conviction in the 'objective' quantification and interpretation of all phenomenon(including human behaviour) as data. It shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief/religion.
 * Dataveillance: The monitoring of people on the basis of their online data that differs from surveillance: whereas surveillance presumes monitoring for specific purposes, dataveillance entails the continuous tracking of (meta)data for unstated purposes.

Adding to Responses Section
Added a section around COVID-19 and how there has been a new avenue of surveillance capitalism surfacing with the electronic tracking for public health entities and the development of mobile apps and potential sharing and gathering of data for contact tracing. There is probably more to be added to this, too. Submitting as a part of a COML course. Kheine (talk) 23:35, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Why Surveillance Capitalism Persists
I find the term "surveillance capitalism" appropriate and current. As for the article itself, I also find the discussion about the origins of this term a distraction.

It is stated that "it will be impossible to end surveillance capitalism in the current digital and political sphere due to the power that large technology companies have politically and economically." and goes on to argue that China should be most feared in its use of surveillance.

These are the same arguments of deflection used by Facebook, Google and the like to stop Governments in the USA and elsewhere enacting laws to regulate the collection of consumer data.

Also missing is reference to the California Consumer Privacy Laws, recently enacted in the home of Google and Facebook.

I also find this article lacking points of reference such as the size and growth of leading exponents of surveillance capitalism such as financial information at:

Unlike 1st person capitalism, the process of surveillance capitalism is opaque to the average user. This article does not address this and in my opinion does little to inform an average user about how their day to day activities are monitored, recorded, processed and fed back to them in a positive feedback loop, fine tuned by artificial intelligence. Hardware, software and infrastructure - where are these details?

To remove any conflict of interest, data supplied by exponents of this form of capitalism should not be used in this article. Goinggoingstillhere (talk) 23:06, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Digital Citizenship
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Rewrite in intelligible English
The sentence "Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action." doesn't come across as correct English. Is that sentence a quote? If yes, please add quotation marks. If it's not a quote, please rewrite it in syntactically correct English. For instance, if it doesn't alter the meaning of the statement, a comma could be added before "with...". But then, what would "intensification of connection and monitoring online" be supposed to mean? It doesn't sound English to me. If however that comma did alter the meaning of the text, what would be the correct syntactical interpretation of that sentence? Maybe make two simpler sentences from this longer unintelligible one.

Secondly, the sentence could also be simplified. E.g., why not replace "driving the intensification" by "intensifying"? Why not replace "becoming open to saturation" to "becoming saturated"? Sakuragaoka2001 (talk) 20:02, 16 December 2023 (UTC)


 * @Sakuragaoka2001. Feel free to edit the article to implement these fixes. WP:BEBOLD. You can read citations or delete if anything is unclear. The article author hasn't edited in 6 years and this article is relatively low traffic. Hope this helps. Happy editing. – Novem Linguae (talk) 13:21, 17 December 2023 (UTC)