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Covid 19: The Future of Surveillance Capitalism

-- By LiasBorshan - 21 Nov 2020

Setting the Scene

The uninhibited rise of surveillance capitalist enterprises over the last two decades has created an immense imbalance with respect to who controls one of humanity’s most prized resources : knowledge. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have at their fingertips “configurations of knowledge” (to borrow from Shoshanna Zuboff) about individuals and society at large that are historically unprecedented. All the while the individuals whose data is being collected have virtually no access to this proprietary knowledge.

To make things worse, this knowledge gives surveillance capitalists (or rather their machine learning algorithms) the ability to predict and shape people’s behaviors surreptitiously without their being consciously aware that it is occurring. Currently, there is no real accountability or regulatory framework for dealing with the trading of this knowledge. These companies wield an uncontrolled power over our behavior that threatens to consume human agency and subjugate organized society in the pursuit of the generation of capital.

The Pandemic : An Opportunity

In the midst of the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, all of these problems are being exacerbated, as these companies have noticed an opportunity to drastically expand the kinds of data that they collect. At first glance, the potential benefits that this behavioral data could provide in devising a pandemic response seems immense. The ability, for instance, to use location data collected on mobile phones to support the creation of contact tracing programs could allow governments to more easily manage their responses to the virus. In fact, one need only look to the UK to see that this is being considered and even being implemented to a certain extent. A number of UK medical researchers requested that tech companies share their data and become involved in the pandemic response. Boris Johnson invited many of these companies to share their resources with the NHS and several companies like Amazon and Microsoft have agreed. As a result of this, the NHS now has a data sharing agreement whereby they can share any patient data that they want with any organization that they want.

A common argument for compelling these companies to share their data and develop programs in collaboration with government organizations to help with the response effort is the fact that they are already collecting this data anyway. Rather than using the data for surveillance capitalism, these companies ought to just help governments or their medical services in containing an extremely dangerous virus. Of course, the help that they would provide would not be limited merely to providing data. These companies want to be the ones developing and implementing the technologies that do the contact tracing.

A Familiar Narrative

In principle, this argument could work. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Of course, there are very serious objections one could (and should) have to the idea of them having collected this data in the first place. There also immense concerns one could have about giving these companies, who are already manipulating human behavior for profit, access to our medical data. But if it means that lives could be saved, why should we not involve these companies and let them use these technologies for the greater good?

Regulation, Regulation, Regulation

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