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Can't agree more with his recommendation of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I hope every Google/FANG employee picks this up and gives it a fair read.

If you are legitimately interested in understanding this train of thought, I highly recommend checking out the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (sp?)

This entire HN post is a share of a review of the book by Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Published 01.15.2019

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an eye opening book related to this subject. The ads are only a first and small step.

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff. It's not exactly a 'how to' manual for privacy, but it is helpful for understanding the scale of the problem.

not surprising. please read 'the age of surveillance capitalism' nearly every move by google (and friends) post-publication (of course, any move pre too) can be captured by the thesis of the book.

I recently finished the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." If you *really* want to understand Google - the real Google, not the PR spun version - then this book is a must read.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

A lot of this is described in the book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by author Professor Shoshana Zuboff[1]. There’s also a good documentary on Netflix (I forget which, I think it’s ‘The Great Hack’[2]), explaining how the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal utilised personal data and more importantly behaviour.

They’re just scarily good at predicting what you are going to do. They’re not listening in. It’s far scarier/more insidious than that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

[2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542

I am currently reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" & I think a lot of people on HN might find it illuminating.

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capita...

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is going to be a seminal book. I am looking forward to receiving my personal copy tomorrow (release is January 15).

The author of the paper, Shoshana Zuboff, is also coming out with a book soon:

"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

Spot on. They're not going to abandon their core, their bread & butter, their monopoly without a new & improved Plan A.

Full disclosure: I'm reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I get more skeptical (and fearful) with each page turn.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

Call me paranoid but I've read similar in the past, and I'm reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" now.

Some start up will productize this offline B&M tracking, and then some Tech Giant will snatch them up and hoover that data. And so on.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

It's a long often too verbose read by "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is unforgiving in its detailing of the past, and relentless in its fear of what the future likely holds.

Most people seem to say "oh I know they're collecting data." Unfortunately they don't - likely can't - grasp the depth and breadth. And the motive? Most will never make it that far.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism rips off the bandaid, one greepy greedy power move at a time.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

Worth reading in this regard: Shoshana Zubhoff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

Re: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

I heard this interview/discussion and had no choice but to buy the book. I'm still reading it but it's very well written. Her ability to frame and communicate her ideas is top shelf.

Yes, highly recommended, if not must read.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

This article reviews Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...).
A worthwhile and detailed analysis of modern social computer systems and the issues associated with survveillance. The question is, do the benefits justify the costs.

I think that the author of this and I can just agree to disagree, which is OK with me.

I am on mastodon https://mastodon.social/@mark_watson and I get a lot of value from it.

re: “I’m privacy-friendly; please donate”: I donate but don't mind identifying myself. If you want anonymity then don't donate to whoever runs the server that you use.

You are free to follow and un-follow (if you see toxic material) as you wish.

I hope that I don't sound like I am lecturing or otherwise being obnoxious, but if you don't think that the large Internet platform companies have too much power then I recommend reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" and "privacy is Power."

The great thing about the Internet is that anyone can get a domain, get creative, share their stuff, meet people, make business acquaintances, etc. I see the Fediverse as another tool to use.

I also have another reason why I feel like download and off-line-only video is important:

Privacy.

Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.

After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.

I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.

I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.

It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.

Privacy isn't damage. Privacy is a threat to profits, it is a form of competition. The less competition, the more freedom to suck up more data and repackage it as product.

It's a long,layered, and sometimes difficult read, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism thoroughly lines up the stones and turns them over. After hearing this, I was obligated to buy it , and read it.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

I am always so surprised when I read articles like this by people in the "ad tech" space by the amount of sheer entitlement to people's attention and data. Apple making this move is treated as if they were denying access to a natural resource, like Nestle putting a fence around your local lake and selling you the water.

Ads are not inherently good, consumers don't need them, and ad companies don't have any right whatsoever to our attention or data. If it can be abused, it will be, and Google and Facebook have shown you can make tens of billions off of personal data and attention. To me it's fundamentally immoral. To see the terrifying endgame to all this, check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.

Shoshana Zuboff is one of those people that make me upset when I discover them. Why didn't I hear about them and their books books much earlier? Is it only because she is not marketing her books well enough?

The Age of the Smart Machine (1988) is truly visionary and well written.

edit:

I'm currently reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The book has well developed concepts like 'behavioral surplus and 'instrumentarianism'. There are also clever terms like 'radical indifference', 'observation without witness', 'equivalence without equality'. They are just plain insightful. I can instantly recognize them as something I could not conceptualize before.

I was happy to see "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and "Permanent Record" on your list. More people are becoming aware of the threats that surveillance has on our society thanks to books like these and even something like The Social Dilemma on Netflix.

I think unfortunately we're going to see a lot of companies adopt a sort of "privacy washing" (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gGb_vKbJLU) before we see much real change in their privacy practices.

I'll definitely add a few of these to my books to read for 2021.

Yes, they are likely tracking users in incognito mode. You're still loading google analytics or doubleclick resources on many, many sites. Merely making that request (or any request to a google property) gives them your IP which is static enough to identify a household or corporate complex based on previously gathered data. From there these javascript libs phone home every bit of data they can from your browser, including UA string/browser minor version, plugins, resolution (fingerprinting). This can further narrow things down to an individual device you have used before, especially if you're just popping in and out of incognito.

Google also operates some of the most popular DNS services 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 which can capture domains you query from your IP.

There are various measures you can go through to stop this to some degree, like DNS blocking, client-side ad/tracker blocking, VPNs etc. but to go all-out is very cumbersome and I'm not convinced that it would even be 100% effective. Google's business DEPENDS on collecting your data and tracking you, and they are very, very good at it. I highly recommend reading "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism".

I'd like to highlight that 60% of apps isn't synonymous with 60% of students. That is, if a dominant app(s) is used by e.g., 80% of students then the impact on privacy and such is even higher.

Full disclosure: I recently finished reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." While I understood the gist of the situation, the book shifted my paranoia even further.

My struggle book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Good, though I think I preferred the earlier books. It's still very compelling, but a little too much Hitler in this one

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. Poetic landscape history, reminiscent of Sebald. Good stuff.

Click here to kill everybody by Bruce Schneier. Scary.

Machines like me by Ian McEwan. First McEwan I read for a while but I liked it more than I expected. I thought the AI bits were quite good.

The deep history of ourselves : the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains by Joseph LeDoux. Bit disappointed in this one, it seemed like there should have been a better story here.

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life: David Quammen.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Makes CS careers look less appealing.

"Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior."

From "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff

You should read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=swMo1sK5ntk

Read 'The age of surveillance capitalism'. Engineers should understand the business models they create.

There is a very good book that I am reading that might change your mind: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Another book I really recommend is Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy.

You make good points and I am not arguing with you, but I found theses two books really convinced me that some balance is required, and worthwhile.

The article is a little thin on breaking news. I think that Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the definitive and scholarly material on AI and data driving people’s actions. Control of behavior at scale. Neoliberalism. All the right topics for understanding where we are headed.

Am I correct to understand that this backdoor tracking of individual users applies to the standard Chromium browser (i.e., the non Eloston ungoogled-chromium) as well as the Chrome browser?

If so, its incredibly consistent with Google's surveillance capitalist business model.[1] Wow. I'm thankful for Firefox.

--

[1] "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", by Shoshana Zuboff, reviewed here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveil...

> Thus my point: I can't think of ways it's seriously impacted my life, other than being an interesting challenge to pursue.

Benefitted? Perhaps not. But you, me, we're all being impacted. The fact that it's not easily recognizable - intentionally, I might add - doesn't mean it isn't there.

Truth be told, I'm approx half way through Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." As for your hopes, she specifically makes mention of the fact that these tools are _not_ being used to solve big problems (e.g., poverty) but instead to harvest more and more data and exploit that as much as possible. Rest assured this imperative is by no means limited.

https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/th...

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

Off topic, I have been enjoying the iOS and iPadOS version 14 betas.

This privacy feature is pro-consumer and I am all for it! I pay money to Google (GCP, Play entertainment stuff) and FaceBook (Oculus VR addict, here!), but I don't want them using any of my data to enrich themselves or other companies.

Everyone should read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power." It was printed about 15 months ago, but is still highly relevant to both convince people that there is a serious problem and also advice on fighting back.

While the article mentioned McNamee and "Zucked", on the topic of behavioral manipulation strategy by big tech, there's a much better, more thorough recent book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita of economics at Harvard. It's an excellent analysis of what big tech is doing, and where it's heading.

Just one quote from an interview in this review:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-...

> "It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society."

I am about 1/3 through reading “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff and while it is a very long read, I recommend it as good survival reading.

I have never been as concerned about privacy as I am about manipulation and forced social engineering. For the last 30 years , I have spent a lot of time writing books. My joke to friends and family has been that I spend evenings writing because I thought network TV is mostly a waste of time but more importantly subjecting yourself to advertisements is a crazy thing to do. Now I consider careless and thoughtless Internet use to be so much worse.

In the book, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"[1], it talks about the MO for the big tech companies. How they push and often subtly change things slowly. The book provides a number of examples of this.

I never expected FB to walk back the privacy change. I even expect their full expectations to be in place in a couple years.

It's what they have successfully done in the past.

[1] https://bookshop.org/books/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalis...

The term was mainly introduced by Shoshana Zuboff in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" [0]. She was describing the way in which organisations harvest personal data to fabricate prediction products than can be traded.

She isn't saying "if you aren't paying for a product then you are the product". She is saying that our clicks are the raw material from which Surveillance Capitalists create a product they can sell. E.g. Facebook use our interactions and meta data to build a rich social graph, and when an advertiser wants a list of people who meet certain criteria, Facebook can then provide them with a list.

This is different to the reasons that governments typically conduct surveillance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

I have offered to loan my copy of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff to friends and family, and no one has taken me up on it. The most I have been able to do is to get a few of them to use Firefox containers.

I consider this a major problem that needs to be fixed, like the division in US society between left and right, income inequality, and corporate control of both political parties.

Shoshana Zuboff does a brilliant job of documenting the bad effects of collecting all digital information in our lives and the use of that data in ways that are against our interests.

I use Google and Facebook, but only to buy things from them, like Oculus Quest, Play books, music, and movies.

I don’t mind paying for services, and I don’t mind them using data on what I have directly purchased from them. I will fight all other forms of data collection.

As discussed in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"[0] it's inconsistent with their business model for Google to comply with GDPR and other similar privacy laws/regulations.

The benefits of the surveillance capitalism business model are seeing business values being recalculated as business owners recognise the value of exploiting vast amounts of data collected in the pursuit of a purpose other than for which it was collected. Microsoft for example has been heading in this direction over the last few years through their acquisition of Lynda/LinkedIn, Github and Glint. I expect other SaaS businesses to increasingly exploit this opportunity.

Personally I support the efforts of Brave in this case and there are other potential targets that I think are vulnerable to a similar complaint. It will be interesting to follow the Irish Data Protection Commission's progress on this.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

I’ve been reading “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” recently, and this is totally the classic case for her argument. We’ve clearly reached the point where our utility to the technology providers has surpassed their utility to us. I have no idea why anyone would have one of those things in their home. It’s no longer a matter of the technology itself, but who is behind it and what they are doing with it. I don’t like the Bezos drives his warehouse workers like something out of a Dickens era factory horror show, but the notion that he’d like to turn me into a “consumption worker” is just too much to stomach.

After reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its many examples of how optimistic psychological studies have been misused by the ad industry to make better ads, I can’t help but think about how this may fall into the same category.

The models used in this study probably measure your mental health along one or more axes that start on “perfectly fine” and ends up at “problematic”. Knowing where someone falls (within the range of what’s ethically acceptable to push ads to) could be very profitable to Facebook and Google. Scanning for mental health problems could also provide them with an excuse to get users to hand over their data.

I've also just started reading 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'.

Some of my colleagues at work use the term 'digital native' to refer to (young) people who have grown up with ubiquitous computing. Next time someone says that, I should now perhaps say "oh, you mean, the wage slaves of the surveillance capitalists".

List plain text (from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2019-...)

    “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” by Shoshana Zuboff
    “The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company,” by William Dalrymple
    “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee,” by Casey Cep
    “Girl, Woman, Other,” by Bernardine Evaristo (Booker Prize winner)
    “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present,” by David Treuer
    “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell
    “Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli
    “Lot: Stories,” by Bryan Washington
    “Normal People,” by Sally Rooney
    “The Orphan Master’s Son,” by Adam Johnson
    “The Yellow House,” by Sarah M. Broom (National Book Award winner, nonfiction)
    “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
    “Solitary,” by Albert Woodfox
    “The Topeka School,” by Ben Lerner
    “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,” by Jia Tolentino
    “Trust Exercise,” by Susan Choi (National Book Award winner, fiction)
    “We Live in Water: Stories,” by Jess Walter

Note that the author of the review criticizes Levine's characterizations, not the facts contained. The same information can be found in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Or in this NBC News article: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/thousands-contracts-h.... Here's the data on techinquiry: https://techinquiry.org/SiliconValley-Military/

The board is made up of about 25 experts, among them Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"; Maria Ressa, a co-founder of the Filipino independent news site Rappler; Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights nonprofit Color of Change; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; Reed Galen, a co-founder of the conservative anti-Trump super PAC The Lincoln Project; Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University; Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician who is international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center; Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia; Safiya Noble, an associate professor of information studies and African American studies at UCLA; Damian Collins, a member of the British Parliament; tech investor Roger McNamee, a frequent Facebook critic; and ex-CIA officer Yael Eisenstat, former head of election integrity operations for political ads at Facebook.