⋅ ⋅ Zeit-Foundation /Digital/ Paper
28. May 2021
A great book by a wonderful woman. Shoshana Zuboff describes in a sympathetic way how the future of the internet should not advance under any circumstances. She replies very clearly to the context between free products (e.g. Facebook, apps/survey, games/quizzes, state Trojans, search engines/Google & Co.), whereby the person who uses it, since it is free, becomes the product himself. Additionally, her elegant book states: the user is not just the product – but much more the experiment.
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 Michal Kosinski (computational psychologist) from Cambridge University and David Stillwell from the Cambridge Psychometrics Center built on this research. Stillwell had already developed the myPersonality database, a third-party app that allows Facebook users to take psychometric tests – such as the Big Five personality traits* – on which they are then given feedback.”
– 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, the database already contained six million personality profiles in 2016; these were supplemented by four million Facebook profiles. Initially a unique, albeit unconventional, source of psychological data, my-Personality had become the database of choice for testing, standardizing, and validating new models for predicting personality scores based on even smaller samples of Facebook data and metadata. In a 2012 research report, the two concluded: »A user’s personality is easily and effectively predicted from publicly available data«. They also pointed out that social media users are unaware of the dangerous exposures they expose themselves with their ignorant but extensive personal disclosures.
Specifically, they highlighted the unilateral reversal of privacy policies by Facebook’s CEO, who announced in 2010 that Facebook users no longer expect privacy at all. The CEO had announced the company’s decision to arbitrarily make personal information of its users accessible: »We decided that those are the social norms now, so we just did it«. Of course, their concerns did not stop the authors from pointing out the relevance of their research results for “marketing”, that “design of user interfaces” and recommendation services. In 2013, another provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel revealed that Facebook “likes“ reveal a wide range of personal attributes that are commonly thought of as private: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political beliefs, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, drug use, parental separation, age and gender.” [1]
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.
„With the mere download of the apps, “the software automatically authorized the collection and modification of sensitive information”. And there was also a lot going on behind the scenes: For example, the researchers found apps that modify or even delete your information (64 %), collect the status of your phone and identity (31 %), collect location data (27 %), view your WiFi connection (12 %) and activate your camera to access your photos and videos (11 %). Between 4 and 6 % went much further: They read the address book, dialed phone numbers found on the device, modified contacts, logged calls made, and activated the microphone to record voices. Finally, the researchers discovered an even darker secret:
Privacy policies simply don’t matter. Of the 211 apps in the group, 81 % didn’t even have any, and for the rest, “not all of the provisions were actually designed to protect privacy”. Of those apps without a privacy policy, 76 % shared sensitive information with third parties, and of those with privacy policies, 79 % shared their data with third parties, with only about half of them actually acknowledging this in their viewable policies. In other words, privacy policies would be far more appropriately covered by the term surveillance policies, which I would like to propose here as well.” [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:
Free support
Awaiting the entry into force of the data protection regulation in May, the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism had already mobilized by the end of April 2018. Facebook’s CEO had already announced a few weeks earlier that the company would implement the European regulation “in its spirit” worldwide. The practice, however, was different as the company made changes to ensure GDPR didn’t get in the way of the majority of its operations.
Until then, relationships with 1.5 billion users – including those in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America – were governed by terms of use they had entered into with FB’s international headquarters in Ireland, putting them under EU law. At the end of April, FB quietly changed its terms of use so that these 1.5 billion users were now subject to American data protection laws, which removed the possibility of a lawsuit in Ireland.” [3]
//Wow, “in their spirit” the CEOs probably forgot in their séance of windy decisions that they command a shady social community portal.
Limits to growth
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.
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 314
[2] Zuboff, 2019, Page 288
[3] Zuboff, 2019, Page 559
[4] Make Love No Nazi
For economic justice ⋅ སེམས
»I am committed to contributing to a world economy that respects the right to life of all humans and all non-human living beings. In this spirit of justice, I reject all privilege and monopoly, and reject all that cannot be shared.
I also avoid accumulating excess, who tempts me to squander goods, while millions of people do not even have the basic necessities. If every man claimed only what is necessary for himself, no one would have to suffer. There is no right to continue consuming more and more, excused by the fact that one is enjoying an already deeply unfair system of distribution of the planet’s wealth. I have to take care of the people and humans who are victims of famine and poverty. Aware that eighty percent of the world’s population suffers from diseases caused by hunger and deprivation, I renounce overconsumption.
I am involved in compensatory actions aimed at correcting the wrong developments of the current economic system, to reduce the existing deep gulf between favored and non-favored nations. Because any economic regime that ignores moral values is unjust. The rules of the international market require clear ethics.«
Dalai Lama, Nouvelle Réalité, Eleven Life Commitments, 2016
Stril-Rever, Rinpoche, Thurman and Itzkin
(15. September 2015, Oxford)