Surveillance capitalism has since the 2010s become the dominant business model of the web: tracking and collecting as much information about website visitors and app users as possible, for profit through manipulation via advertising or other means.
The term has been made popular by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff and her very thorough analysis of the business model in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
The cyborg activist Aral Balkan calls it "people farming", and describes it as an economic model where people are being farmed for their data by the big technology companies.
Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalist are factory farms for human beings. They make their billions by farming you for your data and exploiting that intimate insight into your life to manipulate your behaviour.
With the large tech companies expanding into payment, "smart" devices, cars, homes and ultimately cities, they are in a position to monitor and monetize our every move, relation and activity.
But how is this mass surveillance legal?
The UN Universal declaration of human rights article 12 declare that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence(...)", and that "[e]veryone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference(...)".
In a report published in January of 2020, the Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) writes that:
The online advertising industry is behind a comprehensive illegal collection and indiscriminate use of personal data, (...)
About the report, Finn Myrstad, the director of digital policy in the Norwegian Consumer Council says:
- This massive commercial surveillance is systematically at odds with our fundamental rights and can be used to discriminate, manipulate and exploit us.
Also Amnesty International documents how the surveillance based business model is a threat to our basic human rights in a report from 2021:
But Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.
(Interestingly enough from a page that itself snitches on it's visitors to the surveillance mafia.)