The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Barack Obama's Books of 2019

The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary ro

Their efforts have been marked by a few consistent themes: that technology companies such as Google move faster than the state’s ability to understand or follow, that any attempts to intervene or constrain are therefore fated to be ill-conceived and stupid, that regulation is always a negative force that impedes innovation and progress, and that la

Most important, Schwartz foresaw that the scale of the still-emerging crisis would impose risks that exceed the scope of privacy law: “The danger that the computer poses is to human autonomy. The more that is known about a person, the easier it is to control him. Insuring the liberty that nourishes democracy requires a structuring of societal use o

Two economists who researched this approach discovered that these qualities of surplus produce a predictive model comparable to traditional credit scoring, observing that “the method quantifies rich aspects of behavior typically considered ‘soft’ information, making it legible to formal institutions.”150 “You’re able to get in and really understand

In this picture, commercial surveillance is not merely an unfortunate accident or occasional lapse. It is neither a necessary development of information capitalism nor a necessary product of digital technology or the internet. It is a specifically constructed human choice, an unprecedented market form, an original solution to emergency, and the und

When describing “modern technology platforms,” he writes that “almost nothing, short of a biological virus, can scale as quickly, efficiently, or aggressively as these technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control, and use them powerful too.”11

“Maybe we should set aside a small part of the world . . . as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out what is the effect on society, what’s the effect on people, without having to deploy kind of into the normal world.”27

As the Wall Street Journal reports, new startups such as Affirm, LendUp, and ZestFinance “use data from sources such as social media, online behavior and data brokers to determine the creditworthiness of tens of thousands of U.S. consumers who don’t have access to loans,” more evidence that decision rights and the privacy they enable have become lu

In 2004 Google acquired Keyhole, a satellite mapping company founded by John Hanke, whose key venture backer was the CIA venture firm, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole would become the backbone for Google Earth, and Hanke would go on to lead Google Maps, including the controversial Street View Project. In 2009 Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel both invested in a Bosto