The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  84. Suzanne Daley, “On Its Own, Europe Backs Web Privacy Fights,” New York Times, August 9, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/europe/10spain.html.

  85. Ankit Singla et al., “The Internet at the Speed of Light” (ACM Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1145/2670518.2673876; Taylor Hatmaker, “There Could Soon Be Wi-Fi That Moves at the Speed of Light,” Daily Dot, July 14, 2014, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/sisoft-li-fi-vlc-10gbps.

  86. “Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (Case C-131/12 (May 13, 2014),” Harvard Law Review 128, no. 2 (2014): 735.

  87. Google Spain, 2014 E.C.R. 317, 80–81.

  88. Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, “Transatlantic Data Privacy,” Georgetown Law Journal 106, no. 115 (2017): 131, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3066971. A few of the many excellent analyses of the right to be forgotten include Dawn Nunziato, “Forget About It? Harmonizing European and American Protections for Privacy, Free Speech, and Due Process” (GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper, George Washington University, January 1, 2015), http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/1295; Jeffrey Rosen, “The Right to Be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review Online 64 (2012): 88; “The Right to Be Forgotten (Google v. Spain),” EPIC.org, October 30, 2016, https://epic.org/privacy/right-to-be-forgotten; Ambrose Jones, Meg Leta, and Jef Ausloos, “The Right to Be Forgotten Across the Pond,” Journal of Information Policy 3 (2012): 1–23; Hans Graux, Jef Ausloos, and Peggy Valcke, “The Right to Be Forgotten in the Internet Era,” Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT, November 12, 2012, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/256039959_The_Right_to_Be_Forgotten_in_the_Internet_Era; Franz Werro, “The Right to Inform v. the Right to Be Forgotten: A Transatlantic Clash,” Liability in the Third Millennium, May 2009, 285–300; “Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos.” For a comprehensive review, see Anita L. Allen and Marc Rotenberg, Privacy Law and Society, 3rd ed. (St. Paul: West, 2016), 1520–52.

  89. “Judgement in Case C-131/12: Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González” (Court of Justice of the European Union, May 13, 2014), https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf.

  90. Federico Fabbrini, “The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Rights to Data Privacy: The EU Court of Justice as a Human Rights Court,” in The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as a Binding Instrument: Five Years Old and Growing, ed. Sybe de Vries, Ulf Burnitz, and Stephen Weatherill (Oxford: Hart, 2015), 21–22.

  91. For excellent background on “free speech” and the First Amendment in cyberlaw, see Anupam Chander and Uyên Lê, “The Free Speech Foundations of Cyberlaw” (UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper 351, September 2013, School of Law, University of California, Davis).

  92. Henry Blodget, “Hey, Europe, Forget the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’—Your New Google Ruling Is Nuts!” Business Insider, May 14, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/europe-google-ruling-2014-5.

  93. Greg Sterling, “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin: I Wish I Could Forget the ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” Search Engine Land, May 28, 2014, http://searchengineland.com/google-co-founder-brin-wish-forget-right-forgotten-192648.

  94. Richard Waters, “Google’s Larry Page Resists Secrecy but Accepts Privacy Concerns,” Financial Times, May 30, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f3b127ea-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http %3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Ff3b127ea-e708-11e3-88be-00144feabdc0.html%3Fsiteedition%3Duk&siteedition=uk&_i_referer=https %3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com.

  95. James Vincent, “Google Chief Eric Schmidt Says ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling Has Got the Balance ‘Wrong,’” Independent, May 15, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/google-chief-eric-schmidt-says-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling-has-got-the-balance-wrong-9377231.html.

  96. Pete Brodnitz et al., “Beyond the Beltway February 26–27 Voter Poll,” Beyond the Beltway Insights Initiative, February 27, 2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20160326035834/http://beltway.bsgco.com/about; Mary Madden and Lee Rainie, “Americans’ Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance,” PewResearchCenter (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacy-security-and-surveillance. A national poll conducted by Software Advice found that 61 percent of Americans believe that some version of the right to be forgotten is necessary, 39 percent want a European-style blanket right to be forgotten, and nearly half were concerned that “irrelevant” search results can harm a person’s reputation. A survey by YouGov found that 55 percent of Americans would support legislation similar to the right to be forgotten, compared to only 14 percent who would not. A US survey by Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker published nearly a year after the EU decision found that 88 percent of respondents somewhat (36 percent) or strongly (52 percent) supported a US law that would let them petition companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to remove certain personal information that appears in search results. See Daniel Humphries, “U.S. Attitudes Toward the ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” Software Advice, September 5, 2014, https://www.softwareadvice.com/security/industryview/right-to-be-forgotten-2014; Jake Gammon, “Americans Would Support ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” YouGov, December 6, 2017, https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/06/02/americans-would-support-right-be-forgotten; Mario Trujillo, “Public Wants ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online,” Hill, March 19, 2015, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/236246-poll-public-wants-right-to-be-forgotten-online.

  97. Francis Collins, “Vaccine Research: New Tactics for Tackling HIV,” NIH Director’s Blog, June 30, 2015, https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2015/06/30/vaccine-research-new-tactics-for-tackling-hiv; Liz Szabo, “Scientists Making Progress on AIDS Vaccine, but Slowly,” USAToday.com, August 8, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-07-25/aids-vaccine/56485460/1.

  98. Collins, “Vaccine Research.”

  99. Szabo, “Scientists Making Progress on AIDS Vaccine.”

  100. See Mary Madden and Lee Rainie, “Americans’ Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance,” PewResearchCenter (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacy-security-and-surveillance.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. See the discussion in David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, 7th ed., Studies in Industry and Society 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

  2. See Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

  3. David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City, NY: Ayer, 1922).

  4. Chris Jay Hoofnagle, “Beyond Google and Evil: How Policy-Makers, Journalists, and Consumers Should Talk Differently About Google and Privacy,” First Monday, April 6, 2009.

  5. Reed Albergotti et al., “Employee Lawsuit Accuses Google of ‘Spying Program,’” Information, December 20, 2016, https://www.theinformation.com/employee-lawsuit-accuses-google-of-spying-program.

  6. See Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 116; Hal R. Varian, “Biography of Hal R. Varian,” UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems, October 3, 2017, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/biography.html; “Economics According to Google,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2007, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2007/07/19/economics-according-to-google; Steven Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability,” Wired, May 22, 2009, http://archive.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics; Hal R. Varian, “Beyond Big Data,” Business Economics 49, no. 1 (2014): 27–31.

  Although it’s important to note that Hal Varian is not an executive leader at Google, the
re is a great deal in the public record to suggest that he has played a leading role in helping Google’s leaders grasp the operations and implications of their own commercial logic as well as its extension and elaboration. I compare Varian’s insights to those of James Couzens at Ford. Couzens was an investor and businessman—he would later become a US senator—who served as general manager at Ford. He helped shepherd Ford’s spectacular success with his clear grasp of the new logic of mass production and its economic significance. He was not a theoretician or a prolific writer like Varian, but his correspondence and articles were graced with unusual insight and have remained a vital source for scholars of mass production.

  Varian spent several years as a consultant to Google before becoming the firm’s chief economist in 2007. He notes in his biographical material that “since 2002 he has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy.” When the Wall Street Journal reported on Varian’s new position at Google in 2007, it noted that the position entailed building “a team of economists, statisticians, and analysts to assist the company in ‘marketing, in human resources, in strategy, in policy related stuff.’” In his book on Google, Steven Levy quotes Eric Schmidt reflecting on how the firm learned to exploit its new “click economy”: “We have Hal Varian and we have the physicists.” In Levy’s 2009 Wired article on “Googlenomics,” Schmidt credits Varian’s early examination of the firm’s ad auctions with providing the eureka moment that clarified the true nature of Google’s business: “All of a sudden, we realized we were in the auction business.”

  In the work that I cite here, Varian frequently illustrates his points with examples from Google. He often uses the first-person plural in these instances, such as “Google has been so successful with our own experiments that we have made them available to our advertisers and publishers in two programs.” Therefore, it seems fair to assume that Varian’s perspectives provide critical insights into the premises and objectives that define this new market form.

  7. Hal R. Varian, “Computer Mediated Transactions,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.1; Varian, “Beyond Big Data.” The first article, published in 2010, is the text of Varian’s Richard T. Ely lecture. The second is also about computer-mediated transactions and overlaps substantially with the material in the Ely lecture.

  8. Varian, “Beyond Big Data,” 27.

  9. “Machine Intelligence,” Research at Google, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180427114330/https://research.google.com/pubs/MachineIntelligence.html.

  10. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 125.

  11. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 76, 93.

  12. Levy, In the Plex, 46; Jennifer Lee, “Postcards from Planet Google,” New York Times, November 28, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28goog.html.

  13. Kenneth Cukier, “Data, Data Everywhere,” Economist, February 25, 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/15557443.

  14. Levy, In the Plex, 46–48.

  15. “Google Receives $25 Million in Equity Funding,” Google News, July 7, 1999, http://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google-receives-25-million-in-equity.html.

  16. Hal R. Varian, “Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 2 (2014): 113.

  17. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30, nos. 1–7 (1998): 18, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X.

  18. “NEC Selects Google to Provide Search Services on Japan’s Leading BIGLOBE Portal Site,” Google Press, December 18, 2000, http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/12/nec-selects-google-to-provide-search.html; “Yahoo! Selects Google as Its Default Search Engine Provider,” Google Press, June 26, 2000, http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/06/yahoo-selects-google-as-its-default.html.

  19. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 125. Conflicts were already emerging between serving the interests of an expanding user base and the needs of the portals.

  20. Scarlet Pruitt, “Search Engines Sued Over ‘Pay-for-Placement,’” CNN.com, February 4, 2002, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/02/04/search.engine.lawsuit.idg/index.html.

  21. Saul Hansell, “Google’s Toughest Search Is for a Business Model,” New York Times, April 8, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/business/google-s-toughest-search-is-for-a-business-model.html.

  22. Elliot Zaret, “Can Google’s Search Engine Find Profits?” ZDNet, June 14, 1999, http://www.zdnet.com/article/can-googles-search-engine-find-profits.

  23. John Greenwald, “Doom Stalks the Dotcoms,” Time, April 17, 2000.

  24. Alex Berenson and Patrick McGeehan, “Amid the Stock Market’s Losses, a Sense the Game Has Changed,” New York Times, April 16, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/16/business/amid-the-stock-market-s-losses-a-sense-the-game-has-changed.html; Laura Holson and Saul Hansell, “The Maniac Markets: The Making of a Market Bubble,” New York Times, April 23, 2000.

  25. Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin, 2010).

  26. Levy, In the Plex, 83.

  27. Michel Ferrary and Mark Granovetter, “The Role of Venture Capital Firms in Silicon Valley’s Complex Innovation Network,” Economy and Society 38, no. 2 (2009): 347–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140902786827.

  28. Dave Valliere and Rein Peterson, “Inflating the Bubble: Examining Dot-Com Investor Behaviour,” Venture Capital 6, no. 1 (2004): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369106032000152452.

  29. Valliere and Peterson, “Inflating the Bubble,” 17–18. See also Udayan Gupta, ed., Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 170–71, 190. Junfu Zhang, “Access to Venture Capital and the Performance of Venture-Backed Startups in Silicon Valley,” Economic Development Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2007): 124–47.

  30. Among the first generation of Silicon Valley venture-backed internet startups, 12.5 percent had completed IPOs by the end of 2001, compared to 7.3 percent in the rest of the country, while only 4.2 percent of valley startups attained profitability, a significantly lower proportion than in the rest of the country.

  31. Zhang, 124–47.

  32. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Teaching Johnny Values Where Money Is King,” New York Times, March 10, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/10/us/teaching-johnny-values-where-money-is-king.html.

  33. Kara Swisher, “Dot-Com Bubble Has Burst; Will Things Worsen in 2001?” Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2000, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB9770911 8336535099.

  34. S. Humphreys, “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception,” European Journal of International Law 17, no. 3 (2006): 677–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chl020.

  35. Levy, In the Plex, 83–85.

  36. Levy, 86–87 (italics mine).

  37. See Lee, “Postcards.”

  38. Lee.

  39. Lee.

  40. Auletta, Googled.

  41. John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/business/in-searching-the-web-google-finds-riches.html.

  42. Peter Coy, “The Secret to Google’s Success,” Bloomberg.com, March 6, 2006, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-03-05/the-secret-to-googles-success (italics mine).

  43. For example, consider this exemplary sample of Google patents filed during this general time frame: Krishna Bharat, Stephen Lawrence, and Mehran Sahami, Generating user information for use in targeted advertising, US9235849 B2, filed December 31, 2003, and issued January 12, 2016, http://www.google.com/patents/US9235849; Jacob Samuels Burnim, System and method for targeting advertisements or other information using user geographical information, US7949714 B1, filed December 5, 2005, and issued May 24, 2011, http://www.google.com/patents/US7949714; Alexander
P. Carobus et al., Content-targeted advertising using collected user behavior data, US20140337128 A1, filed July 25, 2014, and issued November 13, 2014, http://www.google.com/patents/US20140337128; Jeffrey Dean, Georges Harik, and Paul Buchheit, Methods and apparatus for serving relevant advertisements, US20040059708 A1, filed December 6, 2002, and issued March 25, 2004, http://www.google.com/patents/US20040059708; Jeffrey Dean, Georges Harik, and Paul Buchheit, Serving advertisements using information associated with e-mail, US20040059712 A1, filed June 2, 2003, and issued March 25, 2004, http://www.google.com/patents/US20040059712; Andrew Fikes, Ross Koningstein, and John Bauer, System and method for automatically targeting web-based advertisements, US8041601 B2, issued October 18, 2011, http://www.google.com/patents/US8041601; Georges R. Harik, Generating information for online advertisements from internet data and traditional media data, US8438154 B2, filed September 29, 2003, and issued May 7, 2013, http://www.google.com/patents/US8438154; Georges R. Harik, Serving advertisements using a search of advertiser web information, US7647299 B2, filed June 30, 2003, and issued January 12, 2010, http://www.google.com/patents/US7647299; Rob Kniaz, Abhinay Sharma, and Kai Chen, Syndicated trackable ad content, US7996777 B2, issued August 9, 2011, http://www.google.com/patents/US7996777; Method of delivery, targeting, and measuring advertising over networks, USRE44724 E1, filed May 24, 2000, and issued January 21, 2014, http://www.google.com/patents/USRE44724.

  44. Three distinguished computer scientists, Krishna Bharat, Stephen Lawrence, and Meham Sahami, invented the technologies and techniques described in this patent (Generating user information for use in targeted advertising).

  45. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, Generating user information.

  46. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 11.

  47. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 11–12.

  48. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 15 (italics mine).