Out of all the money making ideas that technology has produced, selling personal information is still (unfortunately) one of the most profitable product. Interaction with social media, what we like, where we comment, what we react to or what we say about certain things create our online footprint making it easier for online websites to list up in a certain way that we become a part of the group that is unknown to us. This information profiling is sold out to various companies that will further analysis these behaviors and opinions to help in either designing new products or altering these behaviors for their own benefit.
According to professor Shoshana Zuboff of the Harvard business school, we are living in an era of surveillance capitalism, where even our own personalities and behaviors are sold for the profit of bigger companies. The basic idea behind the surveillance capitalism is to bring things from outside the market and generate profit from these intangible commodities. Just like old-time when industrial capitalism was turning heads, before the era of industrial capitalism things like trees, water, the land was just natural and there was no profit generated from them. However, the industrial capitalism changed land into real estate, trees into the wood and then they started generating profit from it. By bringing the era of surveillance capitalism, we are profiting of ourselves and the people around us, this includes personal behaviors, opinions, likes, and dislikes.
In this era, even the private human experience dynamics are sold in an open market for the benefit of brads and companies and the worst thing is that users hands over their own information without knowing what this will be used for. This sequence of buying and selling has created profitable tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft where suggestions for the purchase, designing the next product or selling the next big product and dependent on the users’ data. These companies sell prediction because with knowing about the human experiences, issues and problems now they can design something that is profitable to them later. This might look like its solving issues about in real life, they are predicting behaviors to see what will be in demand in the next few years or months.
Read next: Are mobile phone carriers spying on us? Edward Snowden explains it all
According to professor Shoshana Zuboff of the Harvard business school, we are living in an era of surveillance capitalism, where even our own personalities and behaviors are sold for the profit of bigger companies. The basic idea behind the surveillance capitalism is to bring things from outside the market and generate profit from these intangible commodities. Just like old-time when industrial capitalism was turning heads, before the era of industrial capitalism things like trees, water, the land was just natural and there was no profit generated from them. However, the industrial capitalism changed land into real estate, trees into the wood and then they started generating profit from it. By bringing the era of surveillance capitalism, we are profiting of ourselves and the people around us, this includes personal behaviors, opinions, likes, and dislikes.
In this era, even the private human experience dynamics are sold in an open market for the benefit of brads and companies and the worst thing is that users hands over their own information without knowing what this will be used for. This sequence of buying and selling has created profitable tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft where suggestions for the purchase, designing the next product or selling the next big product and dependent on the users’ data. These companies sell prediction because with knowing about the human experiences, issues and problems now they can design something that is profitable to them later. This might look like its solving issues about in real life, they are predicting behaviors to see what will be in demand in the next few years or months.
Read next: Are mobile phone carriers spying on us? Edward Snowden explains it all
