The collection and analysis of data, has rapidly changed the way economies operate. The emerging order, within this globally connected society based on rapid information exchange, begins to reveal a new form of capitalism - surveillance capitalism. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft (the big 5) now dominate the majority of the internet. Shoshana Zuboff's book 'Surveillance Capitalism' is a dark and veritable discourse, about the deep colonization of our private lives, our behavior serving the emergi
Our Surplus - The Behavioral Data A data scientist commented the other day, “the underlying norm of all software, browsers and apps designed now is data collection...in what way one uses the data depends on the business objectives...”. 'Google Classroom' is just one example, of how systems can be written specifically to target children. New Mexico attorney general filed a class-action suit against Google in 2022, citing its "...various illegal data extraction practices" . At the back end of Chrome and Andro
Privacy!? What's the big deal? “Do people care about privacy?” asks Lauren Jackson (NYT 2022). It’s important, but where do we even start? At the beginning of it all, we have allowed Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok etc to build huge asymmetries of knowledge, about our society, about people and about our daily lives. Instead of living in "a golden age of the democratization of knowledge" (Zuboff), the internet has become something none of us expected. The biggest info-tech and so