The theory and practice of dispossession were developed and refined as the company learned how to counter and transform public resistance as an essential condition for the protection and expansion of its behavioral surplus franchise. Google’s launch of Gmail on April Fool’s Day, 2004, provided an early occasion to climb this learning curve as the corporation faced down public outrage over the automated scanning of e-mail content intended as a fresh source of surplus for targeted ads. Eventually, the dispossession cycle was refined as an explicit theory of change that framed a tactical game plan, which is by now regularly evoked as the surveillance capitalist corporation’s battle-tested response to societal resistance.
The dispossession cycle at Google was so successful in facing down the threats to Gmail that it was replicated and further elaborated in the battles over Google Street View, the street-mapping operation launched in 2007. Once again, the company did not ask permission. It simply repeated the “original sin of simple robbery” and took what it wanted, waiting for resistance to run its course as it devoured and datafied the world’s public spaces, streets, buildings, and homes.
Stage One: Incursion
Street View first entered public awareness with an apparently benign blog post. Peter Fleischer, Google’s “privacy counsel,” helped launch the new “service” by writing a paean celebrating America’s “noble tradition” of public spaces, where, he claimed, “people don’t have the same expectations of privacy as they do in their homes.” As a lawyer, Fleischer knows the work that words do in establishing contracts and setting precedents, so it pays to read his 2007 words with care. His casually declarative prose undertakes some extraordinary work as he asserts that all public spaces are fair game for Google’s taking. In his account, any public space is a fitting subject for the firm’s new breed of incursion without authorization, knowledge, or agreement. Homes, streets, neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities: they are no longer local scenes where neighbors live and walk, where residents meet and talk. Google Street View, we are informed, claims every place as just another object among objects in an infinite grid of GPS coordinates and camera angles.
In his declaration, Fleischer intends to establish Google’s prerogative to empty every place of the subjective meanings that unite the human beings who gather there. Yes, when we leave our home we know we will be seen, but we expect to be seen by one another in spaces that we choose. Instead, it’s all impersonal spectacle now. My house, my street, my neighborhood, my favorite café: each is redefined as a living tourist brochure, surveillance target, and strip mine, an object for universal inspection and commercial expropriation.
Google had already taken everything on the web, but Street View and Google’s other mapping operations, Google Maps and Google Earth (the company’s 3-D view of the world using satellite and aerial imagery), announced an even-more-ambitious vision. Everything in the world was to be known and rendered by Google, accessed through Google, and indexed by Google in its infinite appetite for behavioral surplus. The presumption is that nothing is beyond Google’s borders. The world is vanquished now, on its knees, and brought to you by Google.
The blog post that accompanied Street View is a precise replica of the invaders who once landed on that blameless Caribbean beach. Those adelantados concealed the bare facts of invasion in elaborate gestures of friendship and humility that made it impossible to discern the clear and present danger implicit in their arrival. Fleischer similarly assures his audience of friendly terms. Street View, which used cartoonishly wrapped cars with a large 360-degree camera mount on the roof to capture the imagery it sought, was designed to “respect the privacy of people who happen to be walking down a public street,” Fleischer wrote. “That’s why we designed a simple process for anyone to contact us and have their image removed,” and he promised that it would respect laws and customs “in other parts of the world.”34
Resistance came swiftly and often. By January 2009, Street View was facing opposition in Germany and Japan. John Hanke, by then the vice president for Google Maps–related products, dismissed the uproar. (You will recall that Hanke had founded the CIA-funded satellite mapping company, Keyhole, and after Google’s purchase he led its transformation into Google Earth.) He told a reporter that it was all simply part of a “cycle of people understanding exactly what it is and what it isn’t and what they shouldn’t really be concerned about”—in other words, the dispossession cycle. Google Earth was also under fire, blamed for aiding a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai, but Hanke insisted that the debate over Google Earth or Street View had “mostly died off” in “the West.” He cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom-of-expression interests of authoritarian governments and their “closed information societies.”35 This would become a standard rhetorical device for Google and its allies as they executed their offense.
Was Hanke surprised, then, when in April 2009 residents of the quiet English village of Broughton blocked a Street View car that tried to breach the village perimeter, calling it an unwelcome intrusion? This was “the West,” after all, but the debate over privacy, self-determination, and decision rights was anything but dead. Privacy International submitted a formal complaint to the UK privacy authority, citing more than 200 reports from people who were identifiable on Street View images and demanded that the service be suspended.
Google’s executives had apparently missed Fleischer’s memo on respecting privacy claims. Instead, Hanke dismissed the protesters out of hand. He told the London Times that the company was undeterred and planned to complete coverage of the UK by the end of that year. He declared that Street View’s information was “good for the economy and good for us as individuals.… It is about giving people powerful information so that they can make better choices.”36
Hanke’s remarks were wishful thinking, of course, but they were consistent with Google’s wider practice: it’s great to empower people, but not too much, lest they notice the pilfering of their decision rights and try to reclaim them. The firm wants to enable people to make better choices, but not if those choices impede Google’s own imperatives. Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.
In 2010 the German Federal Commission for Data Protection announced that Google’s Street View operation actually camouflaged a covert data sweep; Street View cars were secretly collecting personal data from private Wi-Fi networks.37 Google denied the charge, insisting that it was gathering only publicly broadcast Wi-Fi network names and the identifying addresses of Wi-Fi routers, but not personal information sent over the network.38 Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39
Google’s “Spy-Fi” scandal filled headlines around the world. Many believed that the Street View revelations would inflict irreparable damage to Google. In Germany, where the firm’s actions were in clear violation of privacy and data-protection laws, officials reacted angrily and warned that Google would face EU investigations and consequences in the German courts. A bill was introduced into the German Parliament that proposed to fine Google for displaying personal property without owner
s’ consent. Google faced fresh litigation in Switzerland, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. By 2012, there were multiple investigations in twelve countries, including most of Europe, the North Atlantic, and Australia, and Google had been found guilty of violating laws in at least nine countries.40
In the US, attorneys general from thirty-eight states launched a probe into Google’s Street View practices. Private citizens filed numerous class-action suits, eight of which were consolidated in the Northern California US District Court. The head of Privacy International said that Google was becoming “Big Brother.”41 The Electronic Privacy Information Center championed substantial legal resistance in the US against Google’s efforts to avoid repercussions in the wake of the Spy-Fi scandal, and it maintained a detailed and continuously updated online overview of the worldwide outrage, protests, investigations, litigation, and settlements in response to Google Street View and its extraction tactics.42
Google characterized Street View’s “privacy violations” as a “mistake” made by a single engineer working on an “experimental” project, whose code had inadvertently made it into Street View’s software. The firm refused to release the identity of the mystery engineer and insisted that the project’s leaders were unaware of the data capture and “had no intention” of using those data. As Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times, “We screwed up,” noting that the engineer in question would face an internal investigation for his clear “violation” of Google’s policies. Unbowed, Schmidt insisted on the validity of Google’s mission to index all the world’s information.43
A 2012 investigation by the Federal Communications Commission described the case as “a deliberate software-design decision by one of the Google employees working on the Street View project.”44 The engineer had been selected for the team because of his unique expertise in Wi-Fi “wardriving,” the practice of driving around using equipment to locate wireless networks.45 His design notes indicated that user traffic and location data would be logged along with “information about what they are doing” that would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” The notes identified but then dismissed “privacy considerations.”46
The FCC found evidence that contradicted Google’s scapegoating narrative. The records showed that the engineer had e-mailed links to his software documentation to project leaders, who then shared them with the entire Street View team. It also found evidence that on at least two occasions, the engineer told his colleagues that Street View was collecting personal data. Despite these facts along with evidence of the company’s exhaustive internal software reviews and testing procedures and the regular transfer of payload data from Street View’s hard disks to Google’s Oregon data center, Google’s engineers denied any knowledge of personal data collection.47
Stage Two: Habituation
Hanke’s bet that the “cycle” would eventually wear down resistance reflects a key operational component of the extraction imperative, discovered in Search, refined with Gmail, and elaborated with Street View. The messages that come through are “Don’t look back. Wait them out. Step on them, if necessary.”
The April 2012 FCC report is heart wrenching in its way, a melancholic depiction of democracy’s vulnerability in the face-off with a wealthy, determined, and audacious surveillance capitalist opponent. In November 2010 the FCC sent Google a letter of inquiry requesting necessary information. Little was forthcoming. By March of the next year, a second “supplemental” letter was sent. Google’s response was incomplete information and lack of cooperation, which produced another “demand letter” in August. Google’s continued lack of engagement required yet another letter in late October. The FCC staff was burdened with following up and chasing down evasive corporate executives and their representatives for an entire year.
The document is a revelation of negative space and a saga of democracy rebuffed. The FCC’s detailed initial request produced “only five documents” and no e-mails. The corporation said that it had no time to undertake a comprehensive review, calling it “burdensome.” Google “failed” to identify relevant individuals. It “redacted” names. It asserted that the information requested “serves no useful purpose.” It “failed” to verify information. When asked for specific submissions, “Google did not do so.” Google “argued” that it should “not be required” to provide access to the payload data it had illicitly collected. “Google waited.…” The phrases “failed to respond” and “failed to provide” are repeated throughout the account. “Google violated Commission orders… delaying.…” Affidavits were requested five times, but the company did not provide any of these until September 2011, after the FCC threatened a subpoena. The mystery engineer simply refused to speak with investigators, citing his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. As the report concludes, “There is evidence that Google’s failure to cooperate with the Bureau was in many or all cases deliberate.” It might have said “imperative.”
Ultimately, the corporation’s lawyers prevailed, defending Google’s data sweeps with a single obscure passage in a decades-old wiretap law. Perhaps the most telling element of the entire episode is that the same democratic system of laws and rules that the corporation openly treated with scorn was invoked to protect it from accountability. In the end the FCC fined Google only $25,000 for obstructing its investigation. Google did not evade legal consequences because society agreed with its practices, but because there was not enough relevant law to protect citizens from its incursions.
The thirty-eight attorneys general did not fare much better. When the group’s leader, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, issued a civil investigative demand (equivalent to a subpoena) to get access to the infamous private data, “Google ignored it.”48 The company finally agreed to settle with the states in 2013, accepting a mere $7 million fine and a series of agreements regarding “aggressive” self-policing. The New York Times announced that Google had finally admitted that “it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project, when it casually scooped up… personal information,” as if this scandal had been the only contested element in the whole affair. State officials crowed that “the industry giant… is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy.”49 In light of the fact that the extraction imperative is what makes this giant a giant, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the confidence of the attorneys general in Google’s commitment to privacy self-regulation.
There are two key elements here that illuminate habituation tactics. The first is the simple fact of the elapsed time between Street View’s initial incursion in 2007, the 2010 scandal, the 2012 conclusion of the FCC inquiry, and the 2013 conclusion of the states’ investigation. The German investigation also closed in late 2012, with little to show for its trouble. Other contests and lawsuits lumbered on. Despite all the sound and fury, Google continued to operate Street View during those years. Between 2008 and 2010, 600 billion bytes of personal information were collected “illegitimately” around the world, 200 billion of those in the US.50 The corporation said that it had discontinued personal data collection. Had it? Can anyone say with certainty? Even if it had, the original incursion that was Street View continued unscathed.
The second point is that in retrospect, one sees that the very idea of a single rogue engineer was designed and elaborated as a brilliant piece of misdirection, a classic scapegoating ploy. It directed attention away from the ambitious and controversial agenda of the extraction imperative toward a different narrative of a single infected cell excised from the flesh of an enormous but innocent organism. All that was left was to excise the infected flesh and let the organism declare itself cured of its privacy kleptomania. Then—a return to the streets, born again.
Google achieved exactly what Hanke had predicted. Street View’s fundamental audacity, the unprecedented astonishing incursion that drew English villagers into the streets to block a Google camera car, enjoyed six more years of rooting in
global consciousness. The corporation’s strategic discipline when it comes to stonewalling, snubbing, and exploiting democracy brought six more years of people using Street View data and six more years to build the tacit case for Google’s inevitability and our helplessness. There were six more years for this simple robbery of decision rights to shade into normalcy and even to be reckoned as “convenient,” “useful,” or “marvelous.”
Stage Three: Adaptation
In October 2010, just before the corporation received the FCC’s first letter of inquiry, Google’s senior vice president of Engineering and Research announced “stronger privacy controls” in an official Google blog post. “We’ve failed badly here,” he said. The Street View scandal was framed as an inadvertent error, a single blemish on a company that works hard “to earn your trust.” The post assured the public that the corporation was talking to external regulators “about possible improvements to our policies” and promised that it would make changes to ensure user privacy. Alma Whitten, a Google executive with credentials in computer security and privacy controls, was appointed as director of Privacy across engineering and product management. The blog also introduced a new internal training emphasis on “responsible collection, use and handling of user data.” Finally, the post pledged new internal controls to oversee how data are handled. “We are mortified by what happened,” it read, “but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users.”51
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 18
