Facebook under fire, but it’s just part of ‘surveillance economy’
In 2007, over lunch with Google officials at a conference, Shoshana Zuboff asked a question: How could she get her house removed from Google Earth, the company’s mapping program.
The whole room fell silent. “It was like I had just announced that I was going to murder somebody,” the Harvard social scientist recalls. The executives responded by asking why she would want to stand in the way of its mission to organize the world’s information and make it accessible to people.
That moment contributed to her growing realization that the digital economy – about which she had once had so much hope – had a hidden side, something she would come to call “surveillance capitalism.”
Although Facebook is currently at the center of a backlash against its sale of users’
Tech’s big benefitsThe Facebook backlashA wider trend of surveillanceNew rules needed?