Abstract
Surveillance capitalism is steadily extending beyond the digital sector and into the broader economy. Firms in industries as diverse as oil and gas, luxury, and mass consumer goods are developing novel internal capabilities to collect, analyze, process, and monetize personal data. This study undertakes an original review of corporate communications to map where in the economy, and to which firms, financial value from personal data accrues. Our findings reveal a largely invisible infrastructure of surveillance-based business practices in which companies work across sectors to monetize personal information.
Often these practices involve “re-identification” using data that is anonymized at source, but then re-combined with data from other sources to re-construct identities and create virtual profiles of individuals that are akin to surveillance-capitalism clones of real humans. This practice is bypassing privacy rules through technical means. Our review examines the ways in which data is stored and processed as part of the phenomenon of accelerating monetization. Companies engaged in some form of monetization include Nvidia, Salesforce, Snowflake, LiveRamp, and Palantir. Some, like Nvidia, are well known, but others operate in relative obscurity. What they have in common is their role in expanding the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism through hardware and software capabilities to extract and monetize personal information.
For these reasons, and to make the distinction with the comparatively well-researched work on Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, we refer to these companies as the dark horses of surveillance capitalism. The dark horses illustrate how surveillance capitalism is evolving into a systemic economic regime that shapes market competition and governance. For example, data-licensing and partnership agreements have created invisible economic pipelines through which personal data flows towards ever more state and business surveillance use cases expanding the private infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. Systematic disclosure and investigation of these agreements and practices would be a necessary first step towards revealing the extent of this invisible infrastructure. We also document how the State itself is a customer of this industry, including the dark horses, thereby placing the State in a position that weakens its resolve and capacity to protect citizens’ rights effectively.
We conclude that democratic institutions have the duty to re-establish the conditions in which public authorities, rather than unaccountable private interests, oversee the governance of this infrastructure.