The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by
Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts
In
2013 a provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel
revealed that Facebook “likes” could automatically and accurately estimate a
wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be
private, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political
views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive
substances, parental separation, age, and gender.
The
fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence
and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make
you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. The
“personal relevancy” score scans and collects everything posted in the past
week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to,
and every Facebook page you’ve liked.
Experiments
are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that
is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different
call-to-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking
algorithms.
Facebook
is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play
that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply
increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later. Facebook owns
an unprecedented means of behavior modification that operates covertly and in
the absence of social or legal mechanisms of agreement, contest, and control.
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