See this[1] interview for a good explanation of surveillance capitalism, from the person that coined the term.
> The idea here is that what is being produced are predictions, predictions of future human behavior that are then sold to markets of business customers who have an interest in what people will do now, soon, and later. So that’s the sequence, the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.
Information is power. Sometimes that power might be used to extract more profit. Sometimes it might be used for Cambridge Analytica style political manipulation. Don't limit your thinking to profit-related use cases. Power can (and will) be used for a wide variety of tasks. A good example of a company using surveillance data is Uber's "Greyball" software. From[2]:
> The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service.
> One technique involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around the government offices on a digital map of a city that Uber was monitoring. The company watched which people were frequently opening and closing the app ... near such locations as evidence that the users might be associated with city agencies. Other techniques included looking at a user’s credit card information and determining whether the card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union. [...] In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were regular new riders or probably city officials.
> When someone tagged [by Greyball] called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars in a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available. Occasionally, if a driver accidentally picked up someone tagged as an officer, Uber called the driver with instructions to end the ride.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] thread> The idea here is that what is being produced are predictions, predictions of future human behavior that are then sold to markets of business customers who have an interest in what people will do now, soon, and later. So that’s the sequence, the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.
Information is power. Sometimes that power might be used to extract more profit. Sometimes it might be used for Cambridge Analytica style political manipulation. Don't limit your thinking to profit-related use cases. Power can (and will) be used for a wide variety of tasks. A good example of a company using surveillance data is Uber's "Greyball" software. From[2]:
> The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service.
> One technique involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around the government offices on a digital map of a city that Uber was monitoring. The company watched which people were frequently opening and closing the app ... near such locations as evidence that the users might be associated with city agencies. Other techniques included looking at a user’s credit card information and determining whether the card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union. [...] In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were regular new riders or probably city officials.
> When someone tagged [by Greyball] called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars in a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available. Occasionally, if a driver accidentally picked up someone tagged as an officer, Uber called the driver with instructions to end the ride.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-an...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
This reminds of a scene in Winter Soldier, Zola's algorithm to predict the future. Another predictive programming?