6.2 Surveillance Capitalism
107
on the data that you provide—either voluntarily or not. However, today, one can basically not use the Internet anymore, if you don’t click “ok” and, thereby, legally agree
with a data collection and processing, which you would probably never find acceptable if you really read and fully understood the Terms of Use. A lot of statements that
tech companies force you to agree with are intentionally misleading or ambiguous.
Hence, you would understand them in a different way than they are meant. “We value
your privacy”, for example, probably means “We turn your private data into value”
rather than “We protect your privacy and, hence, do not collect data about you.”
According to estimates, Gigabytes of data are being collected about everyone in
the industrialized world every day. This corresponds to several photographs per day.
As we further know from the Snowden revelations,
3 secret services accumulate the
data of many companies and analyze them in real time. The storage space of the new
NSA data center, for example, seems big enough to store up to 140 TeraBytes of data
about every human on Earth.
4 This corresponds to dozens of standard hard disks in
laptop computers or the storage space of about 1000 standard smartphones today.
5
You would probably be surprised what one can do with all this data. For example,
one thing that the NSA can do is to find you based on your voice profile.
6 So, suppose
you go on holiday and decide to leave your smartphone at home for the sake of “digital
detox”. However, you happen to talk to someone at the pool bar, who has his or her
smartphone right next to him- or herself. Then, this smartphone can pick up your
voice, figure out who and where you are, and whom you are talking to. Moreover,
some Artificial Intelligence algorithm may turn your conversation into written text,
translate it into other languages in real-time, and search for certain “suspicious”
keywords. In principle, given that we typically speak just a few hundred or thousand
words per day, it would be possible to record and store almost everything we say.
The DARPA project “Lifelog” intended to go even further than that.
7 It wanted
to record everyone’s entire life and make it replay-able. You may not be surprised
that this project seems to have inspired Facebook, which even creates profiles about
people who are not members of Facebook. But this is just the beginning. The plans go
far beyond this. As you will learn in this chapter, the believe that you “have nothing
to hide” will not be able to protect you.
3 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/thensa-files, https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-survei
llance-revelations-decoded.
4 Das NSA Utah Data Center: Wie groß ist ein Yottabyte? ZBW Mediatalk (August 7, 2013) https://
www.zbw-mediatalk.eu/de/2013/08/das-nsa-utah-data-center-wie-gros-ist-ein-yottabyte/.
5 The Chinese surveillance program is perhaps even more data hungry, see e.g. In China, Surveillance
Feeds Become Reality TV, The Wall Street Journal (August 10, 2017) https://www.wsj.com/articles/
in-china-surveillance-feeds-become-reality-tv-1502357405.
6 Finding your voice, The Intercept (January 19, 2018) https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voicerecognition-technology-nsa/.
7 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog (accessed August 4, 2020); https://www.vice.
com/en_us/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-military-tried-to-record-whole-human-lives-it-endedbadly.
107
on the data that you provide—either voluntarily or not. However, today, one can basically not use the Internet anymore, if you don’t click “ok” and, thereby, legally agree
with a data collection and processing, which you would probably never find acceptable if you really read and fully understood the Terms of Use. A lot of statements that
tech companies force you to agree with are intentionally misleading or ambiguous.
Hence, you would understand them in a different way than they are meant. “We value
your privacy”, for example, probably means “We turn your private data into value”
rather than “We protect your privacy and, hence, do not collect data about you.”
According to estimates, Gigabytes of data are being collected about everyone in
the industrialized world every day. This corresponds to several photographs per day.
As we further know from the Snowden revelations,
3 secret services accumulate the
data of many companies and analyze them in real time. The storage space of the new
NSA data center, for example, seems big enough to store up to 140 TeraBytes of data
about every human on Earth.
4 This corresponds to dozens of standard hard disks in
laptop computers or the storage space of about 1000 standard smartphones today.
5
You would probably be surprised what one can do with all this data. For example,
one thing that the NSA can do is to find you based on your voice profile.
6 So, suppose
you go on holiday and decide to leave your smartphone at home for the sake of “digital
detox”. However, you happen to talk to someone at the pool bar, who has his or her
smartphone right next to him- or herself. Then, this smartphone can pick up your
voice, figure out who and where you are, and whom you are talking to. Moreover,
some Artificial Intelligence algorithm may turn your conversation into written text,
translate it into other languages in real-time, and search for certain “suspicious”
keywords. In principle, given that we typically speak just a few hundred or thousand
words per day, it would be possible to record and store almost everything we say.
The DARPA project “Lifelog” intended to go even further than that.
7 It wanted
to record everyone’s entire life and make it replay-able. You may not be surprised
that this project seems to have inspired Facebook, which even creates profiles about
people who are not members of Facebook. But this is just the beginning. The plans go
far beyond this. As you will learn in this chapter, the believe that you “have nothing
to hide” will not be able to protect you.
3 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/thensa-files, https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-survei
llance-revelations-decoded.
4 Das NSA Utah Data Center: Wie groß ist ein Yottabyte? ZBW Mediatalk (August 7, 2013) https://
www.zbw-mediatalk.eu/de/2013/08/das-nsa-utah-data-center-wie-gros-ist-ein-yottabyte/.
5 The Chinese surveillance program is perhaps even more data hungry, see e.g. In China, Surveillance
Feeds Become Reality TV, The Wall Street Journal (August 10, 2017) https://www.wsj.com/articles/
in-china-surveillance-feeds-become-reality-tv-1502357405.
6 Finding your voice, The Intercept (January 19, 2018) https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voicerecognition-technology-nsa/.
7 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog (accessed August 4, 2020); https://www.vice.
com/en_us/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-military-tried-to-record-whole-human-lives-it-endedbadly.