Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[1]
Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self), societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing, this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy.
The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior. Personal smart phone data is available by corporate equipment which pretends to be cell telephone towers thus tracking and monitoring private persons in public spaces which is sold to governments or other companies.[2] Therefore, personal data points increase in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[3] As a result, the increasing price of data has limited access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[4]
Background
Shoshana 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".[5] In 2014, Vincent Mosco referred to the marketing of information about customers and subscribers to advertisers as surveillance capitalism and made note of the surveillance state alongside it.[6] Christian Fuchs found that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.[7]
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.[8] Zuboff contrasts the mass production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism, where the former was interdependent with its populations, who were its consumers and employees, and the latter preys on dependent populations, who are neither its consumers nor its employees and largely ignorant of its procedures.
Theory
Shoshana Zuboff
The terminology "surveillance capitalism" was popularized by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff.[18] 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.[19][20][21][22]
In a subsequent article in 2015, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this
Response
Numerous organizations have been struggling for free speech and privacy rights in the new surveillance capitalism[32] and various national governments have enacted privacy laws. It is also conceivable that new capabilities and uses for mass-surveillance require structural changes towards a new system to create accountability and prevent misuse.[33] Government attention towards the dangers of surveillance capitalism especially increased after the exposure of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal that occurred in early 2018.[4] 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.[34] Surveillance-Capitalism has become a lot harder under these rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulations.[34]
See also
- Decomputing
- Surveillance pricing
Further reading
External links
- Shoshana Zuboff Keynote: Reality is the Next Big Thing, YouTube, Elevate Festival, 2014
- Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization, Shoshana Zuboff
- Capitalism's New Clothes, Evgeny Morozov, The Baffler (4 February 2019)
References
- Shoshana Zuboff. Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action New Labor Forum, January 2019^
- Anstis, Siena, et al. “The Negative Externalities of Cyberspace Insecurity and Instability for Civil Society.” Cyberspace and Instability, edited by Robert Chesney et al., Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 240–78. JSTOR website Retrieved 31 July 2025.^
- John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Data analytics and big data: chapter 5: Data analytics process:there's great work behind the scenes 1 June 2018^