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

of reasons.
Do you know to what degree your movements, 
speech, actions, experiences, and behaviors are 
being processed and sold by businesses like 
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon? 
Few of us do, and that’s just how the purveyors 
of surveillance capitalism would like to keep it.
The key message here is: In surveillance 
capitalism, all aspects of the human experience 
are turned into data and sold to a variety of 
businesses for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, your personal data can help 
businesses better target their advertising efforts. 
Are you getting close to a McDonald’s? Here’s 
an ad for a Big Mac.
But it can also help to create predictive products, 
such as virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, 
which are then used to collect more profitable 
data.
Google was the trailblazer in surveillance 
capitalism and it remains the frontrunner. But it 
wasn’t long before other companies recognized 
the value of this new personal data market. After 
all, once Google began using the data to 
improve the accuracy of targeted ads, the 
company went from bleeding money to seeing a 
3,590-percent increase in revenue – in just four 
years!
Facebook was the first to follow in Google’s 
footsteps, and they’re the only ones who rival 
Google in the sheer amount of accumulated 
data. In a 2015 study at the University of 
Pennsylvania, researchers looked at the top one 
million most popular websites. They found that 
90 percent of them leak personal data to an 
average of nine outside domains where this 
information is tracked and used for commercial 
purposes. Of the websites that leak data, 78 
percent send information to Google-owned 
outside domains, while 34 percent send to 
Facebook-owned domains.
Like Google, Facebook sells advertisers 
targeting data that includes email addresses, 
contact information, phone numbers, and 
website visits from across the internet. In 2012, 
Facebook added a brief mention of this new 
tracking policy to a new terms-of-service 
agreement that was so lengthy that few people 
were likely to read every word. This kind of 
unreadable contract is a typical surveillance 
capitalism tactic. 
Such tracking is not limited to internet browsing, 
however. Other studies have found that many 
apps sold for Google Android devices contain 
trackers that leak personal information even 
when they’re not actively being used. And, 
perhaps unsurprisingly, Google Android devices 
themselves, like most “smart” devices being sold 
these days, provide a constant stream of 
location and behavior data.
How did we get here? Why does using the 
internet or digital products now essentially mean 
opening the door to aggressive monitoring by 
unknown parties? In the next couple of blinks, 
we’ll look at how surveillance capitalism came to 
be.