{"id":298574,"date":"2020-02-27T15:52:34","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T20:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=298574"},"modified":"2023-11-08T20:24:03","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:24:03","slug":"surveillance-capitalism-author-sees-data-privacy-awakening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2020\/02\/surveillance-capitalism-author-sees-data-privacy-awakening\/","title":{"rendered":"An awakening over data privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tNation & World\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tAn awakening over data privacy\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tAlvin Powell\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tZuboff says public finally starting to understand the dangers of freely sharing their information with corporations, government\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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For the first time since 2007, Shoshana Zuboff is feeling optimistic.<\/p>\n

Zuboff, an emerita<\/em> Harvard Business School professor and internet privacy advocate<\/a>, said the outpouring of concern she\u2019s seen at stop after stop on what has been a 14-month speaking tour for her latest book has given her hope that people are finally waking up to the dangers of freely sharing their data with tech companies like Facebook and Google.<\/p>\n

Zuboff said that 2007 was a watershed year when digitization of the world\u2019s information was largely complete, having climbed from 1 percent of global information in 1986 \u2014 including words, cultural assets, laws, languages \u2014 to 25 percent in 2000 to 97 percent in 2007. Today, she said, virtually all of the world\u2019s information is in digital format.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like my entire adult life has been spent in observation of this epistemic trauma,\u201d Zuboff said. \u201cIt\u2019s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.\u201d<\/p>\n

What alarms Zuboff so much is not the digitization of information per se but rather the claims of ownership that major internet companies have put on the data, including that from millions of consumers, and its subsequent use. The root of the trouble, she said, is that instead of viewing that shared information as a public good \u2014 to be used to improve individual lives and society \u2014 it has been used to gain money and power.<\/p>\n\r\n\t\n\n\t

\"Shoshana

Shoshana Zuboff speaks at the Kennedy School.\t\t\t<\/p>

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Increasingly that data has been used not just to analyze behavior but to predict it, and, most worrisome, to change it. Zuboff shared several examples, such as advertisers creating stops in the Pokemon Go game to generate foot traffic to their stores, a Facebook proposal to alert advertisers when analytics indicate a consumer\u2019s brand loyalty is in jeopardy, allowing them to head off the switch to another product, and the data-collecting plans that \u2014 before public outcry \u2014 were part of Google\u2019s planned 12-acre \u201csmart city\u201d development in Toronto.<\/p>\n

In recent years, governments have caught on to the potential of monitoring citizens and shaping their behavior, with troubling implications for religious and ethnic minorities who might be targeted, as reportedly has been happening in China.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne scientist described it, \u2018We can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change that way. We are learning how to write the music \u2014 and then we let the music make them dance,\u2019\u201d Zuboff said. \u201cThis new power does not employ jackbooted soldiers to threaten us with terror and murder. It has no intention of sending people to knock on your doors in the middle of the night, to drag you to the gulag or the camp. It works through the medium of the digital to impose its will remotely, more likely to be toting a cappuccino than a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

But at long last, Zuboff said, the crowds she\u2019s seen on her travels to speak about her 2019 book, \u201cThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,\u201d have begun voicing a deepening concern about who owns their data.<\/p>\n

Crowds have sometimes topped 1,000, she said, and their mood has been expressed in a list of words she solicits about their feelings on the subject. The list includes \u201canxiety, fear, manipulation, democracy, resistance, and rebellion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are words I hear over and over again,\u201d Zuboff said.<\/p>\n\r\n

\u201cI feel like my entire adult life has been spent in observation of this epistemic trauma. It\u2019s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.\u201d<\/p>\nSoshana Zuboff<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\n

Zuboff spoke Monday at the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy during an event co-sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The event is part of the Carr Center\u2019s yearlong examination of technology\u2019s impact on society, called \u201cTowards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21st Century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carr Center Director Mathias Risse, the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration, said the talk highlighted the evolution of public opinion on the subject. A decade ago, he said, tech optimism abounded, fed by the belief that the free flow of information would provide citizens the knowledge to improve their lives, including making government more responsive to their needs.<\/p>\n

Today, he said, tech pessimism has taken over as governments and corporations have illustrated that they too understand the potential power of controlling the internet\u2019s knowledge flow and showed their ability to wield that power.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are deeply worried about these things,\u201d Risse said.<\/p>\n

Zuboff said she\u2019s encouraged by her lecture crowds because the solution to the problem lies in our hands, in the much-maligned practice of democracy, which she called the \u201conly antidote.\u201d Laws that clarify who owns an individual\u2019s data \u2014 two have been filed at the federal level in the last year \u2014 can shift the landscape and create a tech environment in which people determine where and with whom to share their private information \u2014 DNA data for medical research but not for commercial consumption, for example.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now most discussions already begin with \u2018data\u2019 \u2014 data ownership, data portability, data accessibility, and so forth \u2014 and my view is that once the sentence begins with \u2018data\u2019 then we\u2019ve already lost,\u201d Zuboff said. \u201cWhat should become data in the first place, that is where the line has to be drawn.\u201d<\/p>\n\r\n

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