Dataism

⋅ ⋅ Zeit-Foundation /Digital/ Paper

„Data is the raw material of the future,” said Merkel at the members’ congress in September 2015, an event organized by Google, Facebook and the Federal Association of Digital Economy. In the future, value creation will primarily come from the use of customer data. So the raw material of the future is us, neatly broken down into data packets and reassembled to generate competitive profits or surveillance capitalism.

People are unsuspectingly exploited as livestock in factory farming like laboratory rats, to gain predictive products or excess behavior from technological advance by manipulating our privacy, confidence, ignorance or emotions. Through this networked raw material data, surveillance capitalism not only tries to influence our decisions, but capitalism also trains and perfects profit-oriented artificial intelligence with the free mass of data.

„In the UK a team of researchers, including Cambridge University’s Michal Kosinski and the deputy director of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre, David Stillwell, built on this line of research.Stillwell had already developed the myPersonality database, a “third-party” Facebook application that allows users to take psychometric tests, like those based on the five-factor model, and receive feedback on their results.”

– Swarm behavior (Metric distance) –

*The Big Five personality traits five-factor model) as been the standard in personality psychology since the 1980s at the latest, mainly because it lends itself to computer-aided analysis. The model is based on a taxonomy of five basic personality dimensions: 1. Extra version (tendencies towards sociability, dominance, and cheerfulness); 2. Social compatibility (tendency towards friendliness and harmony); 3. Conscientiousness (tendency towards long-term planning, self-discipline and diligence); 4. Neuroticism (tendency to be anxious and nervous); 5. Openness to new experiences or intellect or culture (tendency to deal with profound and aesthetic themes). /ocean model/

Launched in 2007 and hosted at the Psychometrics Centre, by 2016 the database contained more than six million personality profiles complemented by four million individual Facebook profiles. Once regarded as a unique, if offbeat, source of psychological data, myPersonality had become the database of choice for the scoping, standardization, and validation of the new models capable of predicting personality values from ever-smaller samples of Facebook data and meta-data. Later, it would become the model for the work of a small consultancy called Cambridge Analytica, which used the new caches of behavioral surplus for an onslaught of politically inspired behavioral micro-targeting.

In a 2012 paper Kosinski and Stillwell concluded that “user personality can be easily and effectively predicted from public data” and warned that social media users are dangerously unaware of the vulnerabilities that follow their innocent but voluminous personal disclosures. Their discussion specifically cited Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s unilateral upending of established privacy norms in 2010, when he famously announced that FB users no longer have an expectation of privacy. Zuckerberg had described the corporation’s decision to unilaterally release users’ personal data information, declaring, “We decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it.”

Despite their misgivings, the authors went on to suggest the relevance of their findings for “marketing,” “user interface design”. In 2013 another provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel revealed that FB “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.” [1]

⋅ ⋅ 2023 A Space Odyssey

Zuboff describes in this regard very devotedly why the “General Terms and Conditions” of such dubious services extend into cosmic expanses, and man, ignorant of these confusing regulations, consents to a legal scribble. With other words: A reputable software provider would under no circumstances consider exploiting compromising legal loopholes that remain hidden from the user.

„Among these apps, merely downloading the software automatically “authorized collection and modification of sensitive information.” The researchers identified a great deal of backstage action, including apps that modify or delete your information (64 percent), read your phone status and identity (31 percent), gather location data (27 percent), view your Wi-Fi connections (12 percent), and activate your camera in order to access your photos and videos (11 percent). Between 4 percent and 6 percent of the apps went even further: reading your contact lists, calling phone numbers found in your device, modifying your contacts, reading your call log, and activating your microphone to record your speech.

Finally, the research team unearthed an even darker secret: privacy policies do not matter. Of the 211 apps in the group, 81 percent did not have privacy policies, but for those that did, “not all of the provisions actually protected privacy.” Of those apps without privacy policies, 76 percent shared sensitive information with third parties, and of those with privacy policies, 79 percent shared data while only about half admitted doing so in their published disclosures. In other words, privacy policies are more aptly referred to as surveillance policies, and that is what I suggest we call them.” [2]

– Swarm behavior (Movement) –

Fortunately, since 2018, the EU has had the GDPR/DSGVO, which legally holds the disclosure of personal data or sale to third parties to account. The only concern is how does the GDPR relate to the rest of the countries in the world that are excluded from this regulation? The author pointed out a very interesting fact:

Surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives were already on the move in late April 2018, in anticipation of the GDPR taking effect that May. Earlier in April, Facebook’s CEO had announced that the corporation would apply the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) “in spirit” across the globe. In practice, however, the company was making changes to ensure that the GDPR would not circumscribe the majority of its operations.

Until then, 1.5 billion of its users, including those in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America, were governed by terms of service issued by the company’s international headquarters in Ireland, meaning that these terms fell under the EU framework. It was in late April that FB quietly issued new terms of service, placing those 1.5 billion users under US privacy laws and thus eliminating their ability to file claims in Irish courts.” [3]

//Wow, “in their spirit” the CEOs probably forgot in their séance of windy decisions that they command a shady social community portal.

The alternative supply routes of the Internet giants are very revealing in Zuboff’s descriptions. Using rejected products such as Goggle Glass, the author illustrates a disturbing habituation process being carried out on defenseless employees using similar products, until the inhibition threshold of a self-evident acceptance for all people corresponds to everyday life. Seems very questionable how we are led to the excessive costs for internet providers or smartphones and how we carelessly support this progress in the field of AI/voice assistants. Why do these providers still need employees in the near future? Your services already function primarily through algorithms.

@ economies of scope

It seems as if the artificial intelligence squadrons will respond to us with all solutions to future ecological problems as a panacea, meanwhile, the environment of this unique planet is dying from the unbridled exploitation of its exhausting resources.

The author not only illustrates the communication of Wi-Fi/WLAN/Bluetooth/MAC tracking of e.g. smartphones on digital advertising media, At the same time, Ms. Zuboff discusses the feverish research into a future networked home, furniture (even beds trying to fertilize the mind), household items, clothes (whereby people are not only tracked but analyzed – especially endorphins after they have completed fitness or meticulously placed advertising offers after body performance) or vehicles with commercial display windscreens or dashboards of coveted futuristic cities that the drooling vendor wishes to deactivate in the event of default.

– Google receives the BigBrotherAward 2021 –

For recently exposed large-scale manipulations of the Internet advertising market, for star-ving creators and the media, and for dispossessing our digital personalities.

The fascinating idea of the original Internet, the brilliance of our communication of a peaceful world, is fading into the aberrations of degenerate technological innovations. Corrupting power interests, system constraints, lobbies with legions of jurists whose legal situation corresponds to insane dominance appear on the World Wide Web; by which our civilization is not enchanted with a third modernity – all the more manipulated by a burgeoning morbid control mania. Whereas the nurturing spirit of the obsolete friendly library is losing its esteem ⋅ སེམས གཟིགས

[1] Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019, Page 175
[2] Zuboff, 2019, Page 161
[3] Zuboff, 2019, Page 304
[4] Make Love No Nazi