Where Can One Learn about Surveillance Capitalism and Behavioral Data?
May 21, 2021
I read “Shoshana Zuboff: We Must Confront Extraction of Behavioral Data Head On.” Dr. Zuboff is the heralded academic who explained in Surveillance Capitalism the how, what, and why of big technology business tactics. The write up reports about several themes addressed in her book; for example, the destruction of privacy. The article quotes Dr. Zuboff as saying:
On the demand side, markets that commodify human behavior and trade in human behavior should be “outlawed”, says Zuboff. … “We never agreed to it. And there is almost no law to contain it, and yet if you fundamentally described this process to any child you say ahey [sic], somebody took from me without asking, now they’re selling it and they’re using it to make money for themselves, what should I do?’, that child will say they stole something from you. You should call the police.”
Interesting. What’s not clear, however, is the emphasis on behavioral data. I did a little online research and learned that one of the Edward Snowden documents includes a presentation called “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.” This particular document appears to have been produced by the British government, but it carries neither a date nor an author. The document does appear in the Snowden Archive. A bit of searching is required to locate the once classified PowerPoint. I tried the acronym “HSOC”, and it seemed to work. Your mileage may vary.
Once you have the document, you will learn that the core idea is to use behavioral data so that some non-US government agencies can build cyber magicians. The idea is deception. Magic tricks. In order to develop this craft, an entity needs human intelligence (data), operations that influence, and outputs that yield results. There are some interesting visuals; for example, the figure for masking, repackaging, and dazzling shown below (page 18):
The discussion of behavioral data in the news article is sketchy. Dr. Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism does not, to my recollection, cite this open source document. To me it sure seems germane to the business tactics of some of the high technology firms. The clickstream data plus metadata gathered from individual user’s actions across other online services makes clear the importance of “behavioral data.” What most discussions of tracking overlook is the notion of sensemaking. It’s quite important in my opinion. Sensemaking “intermediates” a number of other processes; for example actions and how to think.
The cited news article and Dr. Zuboff might be more enlightening if public documents were reviewed and discussed.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2021
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