False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

Google’s Street View and Glass operations 
are great examples of outrage turning to 
acceptance.
Initial concerns about the internet-wide tracking 
capabilities of cookies have clearly fallen by the 
wayside. And as we look at how surveillance 
capitalism came to be, we can see that this is a 
recurring trend. There is initial outrage upon 
discovering the invasive practices of surveillance 
capitalists. But this eventually turns into a sense 
of begrudging acceptance.
Sadly, this plays right into the hands of 
companies like Google and Facebook, who 
explicitly want the general public to believe that 
their practices are inevitable.
The key message here is: Google’s Street View 
and Glass operations are great examples of 
outrage turning to acceptance.
There’s a chance that you’ve seen the odd-
looking Google car, with a 360-degree camera 
sticking out like a periscope. But perhaps you 
didn’t know that such cars were taking more 
than just pictures.
In 2010, a German federal agency found that the 
Google Street View cars were quietly scanning 
WiFi 
networks 
and 
collecting 
personal 
information from any of the unencrypted 
transmissions they came across. Naturally, this 
caused an international uproar. And, after 
investigations in 12 countries, Google was found 
to have broken laws in at least nine.
However, prosecuting cases like these isn’t so 
straightforward. The primary problem is that the 
practices 
of 
surveillance 
capitalism 
are 
unprecedented, so there usually aren’t any laws 
that specifically address privacy and boundary 
issues in the digital sphere. As you may already 
know, Google’s Street View program has only 
continued to expand.
In 2012, there was also a public outcry over the 
introduction of Google Glass, a wearable 
technology that allowed Google to see into 

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private spaces. The negative reaction led to a 
rebranding and the introduction of the “Glass 
Enterprise Edition” in 2017, which positioned the 
product as being designed strictly for the 
workplace, where people may already have 
lowered expectations of privacy.
But Google had already found a wildly 
successful way of getting into the nooks and 
crannies of private life. Niantic, the gaming 
company owned by Google’s Alphabet Inc., 
released Pokémon Go in 2016. The game uses 
a device’s camera and GPS information to 
reveal the location of virtual Pokémon creatures 
that users can capture. Those Pokémon can be 
located in people’s backyards and inside 
businesses – places where Street View cameras 
may have yet to capture.
The 
game 
was 
a 
massively 
popular 
phenomenon. But it’s really an amazing means 
of capturing personal information. The reason 
the game requires access to your contacts and 
needs “to find accounts on device” has nothing 
to do with gameplay and everything to do with 
surveillance capitalism.