I Love a Surprise

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Thanks to surveillance capitalism the internet has become a surveillance prison: no guards, no guns, no bars… no exit.
 

In 2024, the biggest election year in modern history, young people in Europe and the US voted for polarizing illiberal figures more than ever before. What did it mean? In a search for answers the Friedrich Naumann Foundation based in Geneva launched a five-country survey (Hungary, France, Poland, Germany and the United States) of more than five thousand Gen Z voters ages 16-24 to explore their views on human rights and democracy. There was much good news in their results that deserves careful attention and at least, for me, one big surprise.

Among many questions, the survey participants were asked to rank the importance of ten human rights: "freedom of assembly, freedom of opinion, the right to own property, equality before the law, free and fair elections, the right to reproductive health, freedom from discrimination, the right to privacy, rights to sexual orientation and gender identity, and the right to a healthy environment." I admit my surprise when I saw that 88.8% of survey participants ranked "the right to privacy" as the most important of the ten.

Why was I surprised? Because 2024 also marked the 24th birthday of surveillance capitalism, now a global institutional order and dominant economic paradigm that has destroyed privacy as the necessary cost of its own existence. Surveillance capitalism is founded on the breakthrough idea that human experience can be rendered as highly predictive data and commodified just like tons of wheat or barrels of oil. The new markets for these predictions, developed under the pretext of "personalization," became known as "behavioral advertising" and produced the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in modern history.  For the sake of that wealth and power, every creature, space, and object would be rendered as data to fill the supply chains of the new ad markets.

Thanks to the banality that is behavioral advertising, privacy became a zombie category for most people on earth, at least everyone who must use the internet or engage with any connected device or application. Indeed, thanks to surveillance capitalism the internet has become a surveillance prison: no guards, no guns, no bars...no exit.

Surveillance capitalism is founded on the breakthrough idea that human experience can be rendered as highly predictive data and commodified just like tons of wheat or barrels of oil.

Privacy, even as we knew it in the year 2000, simply no longer exists. As zombies do, privacy stumbles and bumps into walls trailing memories of an increasingly distant time before the global surveillance infrastructure that I have called Big Other was normalized as an inevitable feature of digital technology and its century. We speak of "personal data protection," but who questions the production of those data or how and why any of it becomes data in the first place? Who asks why such data need protection or from whom? from what? The horses of privacy bolted long ago, leaving the barn door in tatters, yet somehow, we imagine them as still quietly munching in their stalls.

If you are between the ages of 16 and 24, you have come of age in a world of vanishing privacy. You are never alone, especially if you drag around phone, an always-on surveillance facility capturing literally everything you do, think, and feel and shuttling that information to the likes of Google and Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and the vast global commercial zone known as ad-tech. If you don't have phone in your pocket, it only takes a moment for anyone to pop a photo, tag you, and dump you into the world's information bloodstream. Our homes are no longer sanctuaries but extensions of the hive world replete with connected appliances from TVs to mattresses to refrigerators, thermostats, lightbulbs, vacuum cleaners, door bells, and on and on, all of them engineered to scrape and steal our "data." This is the world into which we sent our children, innocent and unprotected.

The more I thought about it, the more I fell in love with the 88.8%, a number that exposes a widely shared yearning for a life quite different from the one that was made for them––a private life. I recalled the rhythm of my thoughts as I wrote the final pages of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. "The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. Surely the age of surveillance capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them." If you've grown up in a desert, then access to water is likely to strike you as humanity's most precious right.

A day dedicated to the celebration of data privacy makes me sad, kind of like "Earth Day" at a time when key political leaders and their governments around the world refuse to show up in any meaningful way, letting the planet and its people burn and suffer for the sake of their own interests and ignorance.

The 88.8% exposes a widely shared yearning for a life quite different from the one that was made for them—a private life.

And as in the case of the climate crisis, it is the United States that leads the West in its determination to eliminate privacy from every human space. In 2022 Jon Leibowitz, former Chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, wrote an astonished op ed in the Wall Street Journal.  "Congress has shown itself unable to move forward with consumer privacy legislation," he lamented... "In 2012...we (at the FTC) recognized that industry self-regulation of privacy was not working...We urged Congress to pass a law...In the years since, surveillance capitalism has only gotten worse..."

A report from the NGO Privacy International echoes and globalizes Leibowitz's facts. "Despite multiple challenges, political and legal, around the world, surveillance capitalism continues to be the dominant business model. It entrenched disrespect for users' personal data so deep into tech companies' ethos that the foundation of genAI itself was the exploitation of this data through scraping and processing ..."

That ethos of surveillance capitalism is intensified with the latest iteration of Chatbot capabilities. Both Google and Open AI have announced their moves into "personalized" ads. Google will now extract personal data from its popular Gmail pages, as well as Drive and Google Chat. The company says that individuals can opt in to these new operations, but any lack of vigilance risks exposing highly personal data to Google's work to "improve our services, including machine learning." The Wall Street Journal reports that Open AI will begin testing ads in its Chatbot. It's a move described as a "major shift" in business strategy as the company is driven to find new lines of revenue to offset its vast expenses.  These new surveillance revenues are too lucrative to pass up. Once again, the US leads in the absence of laws to oversee and contain these activities in ways that align with the right to privacy and other democratic rights and principles. The Trump Administration's AI Action Plan is dedicated to removing any and all regulatory barriers to US dominance in AI.

I've fallen in love with the 88.8% as they reject the distopic features of a world shorn of the sanctuary that only privacy makes possible. I know that there are paths forward, and I believe we will find them. Perhaps with the leadership of the 88.8% our sleeping sensibilities and sense of righteous outrage will be reawakened as we finally reckon with the demands of a human future and the realization of a flourishing digital century.

Shoshana Zuboff is co-director of the Carr-Ryan Center's Fellowship program on "Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?". She is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.