This allows them to better understand these domains, and they will likely eventually find a way to exploit them commercially. Such products allow big tech to gather data on our everyday lives even when we are away from our screens. Think, for example of Amazon Alexa and Google Home. The means through which this surveillance can take place is constantly evolving.
It doesn’t allow them to sell products – it makes them a critical part of the infrastructure of the digital economy. The ability to build up this picture gives them a significant commercial advantage, and significant power within the digital ecosystem. It allows them to build a picture of our preferences and our behaviours.
This is ‘surveillance’ insofar as the data that they collect lets them ‘watch’ users on their platforms. Surveillance capitalism is an idea that has been developed to explain how technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon are able to successfully monetize the information and data they collect about us. More importantly, it could also help us identify what we need to do to solve them. This is because the genealogy of the concept and the way in which different people have explained and defined it – most significantly Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff – has serious implications for how we understand ‘big tech’ and the problems it is causing. But although its explanatory power has an allure for many people, it’s important to explore what surveillance capitalism is in more depth.
The concept of surveillance capitalism is an important one in helping us to better understand our relationship with big technology companies like Google and Facebook.
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