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Surveillance capitalism is a new term addressing the process of commodifying personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. Since personal data can be commodified it has become one of the most valuable resources on earth. The concept arose after advertising companies saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more specifically. Since 2014, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has used and popularised the term.

Increased data collection may have various advantages for individuals and society such as self-optimization (Quantified Self), societal optimizations (such as by smart cities) and new or optimized services (including various web applications). However, collecting and processing data in the context of capitalism's core profit-making motive might present an inherent danger. Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing. This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy. 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. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known. Due to the capitalist market mechanism the increasing price of data has caused limited accessibility to the richest in society of buying personal data points.

Background
Zuboff writes that "analysing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems". In 2014 Vincent Mosco referred to the marketing of information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and makes note of the surveillance state alongside it. Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism. Similarly Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as informants for this type of capitalism. Their research is demonstrating that the capitalist addition to analysing massive data sets has given its main purpose an unexpected turn.

Analysing massive data sets was at some point not only executed by the state apparatuses but also companies. In Zuboff's research she claims that the two companies; Google and Facebook invented and transferred surveillance capitalism into "a new logic of accumulation". This mutation entailed that both companies were massively gathering data points about their users, with the core purpose of making profit. By selling these data points to external users it became an economic mechanism. The combination of the analyzation of massive data sets and using those data sets as a market mechanism, has shaped and changed the concept of surveillance capitalism.

Oliver Stone, creator of the film Snowden pointed to the location-based game Pokémon Go as the "latest sign of the emerging phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism". Stone critiqued the game as the location of its users was not only used for game purposes, but also to retrieve more information about its players. By tracking their users location they receive acces to a lot more than their name an location "it can access the contents of your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and phone activities, and can even activate your phone, when it is in standby mode". With all this information data companies like Google that have invested in this game, retrieve acces to users personal data, which they then commodify to improve advertisement.

Another addition to surveillance capitalism is the influence it has had on political campaigning. Personal data retrieved by data miners enabled companies like, Cambridge Analytica to not only use personal data points for commercial advertisement, but that it is also effective for political advertisement. This way political parties were able to advertise their campaign more specifically. However, Doctorow writes that misuse of these data sets "will lead us towards totalitarianism".

Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff contrasts mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism with the former being interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees and the latter preying on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures. She notes that surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm and accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights and operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent. Surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy. This might present a further power shift beyond the nation-state and towards a form of corporatocracy.[citation needed]

In Zuboff's theory, surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. In her 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism, 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.

In a subsequent 2015 article, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this mutation of capitalism. She differentiated "surveillance assets", "surveillance capital", and "surveillance capitalism" and their dependence on a global architecture of computer mediation that she calls "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power which constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.

According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered at Google and later Facebook, in much the same way that mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered at Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has now become the dominant form of information capitalism.

In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified surveillance capitalism's mechanisms and practices, including the manufacture of "prediction products" for sale in new "behavioral futures markets". She introduced the concept "dispossession by surveillance" and argued that it challenges the psychological and political bases of self-determination as it concentrates rights in the surveillance regime. This is described as a "coup from above".

Key features[ bewerken]
Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published on January 15, 2019. It is a detailed examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism and explicitly follows the four key features identified by Google's chief economist, Hal Varian:


 * 1) The drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis.
 * 2) The development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation.
 * 3) The desire to personalize and customize the services offered to users of digital platforms.
 * 4) The use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers.

Response
Numerous organizations have been struggling for free speech and privacy rights due to surveillance capitalism and various national governments have enacted privacy laws. Government attention towards the dangers of surveillance capitalism especially increased after the exposure of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal that occured in early 2018. In response to the misuse of mass-surveillance multiple states have taken preventive measures. The European Union, for example, has reacted to these events and restricted its rules and regulations on misusing big data. Surveillance-Capitalism has become a lot harder under these rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulations. However, implementing preventative measures against misuse of mass-surveillance is hard for many countries as it requires structural change of the system.

It is also conceivable that new capabilities and uses for mass-surveillance require structural changes towards a new system to prevent misuse.[citation needed]