But you can still reclaim your privacy from the surveillance economy.
 | By Jyoti Thottam Deputy Op-Ed Editor |
How quickly can one company transform the world and the way we experience it? |
For Facebook, it took only a decade. Along the way, it has become a trillion-dollar company and a lightning rod for everything that feels wrong about online culture. Leaked documents and the recent congressional testimony of Frances Haugen, a data scientist who worked at Facebook for years, has again focused the world's attention on social media companies and has renewed calls for legislators to do something about the tech giant's enormous power, through new privacy regulations or antitrust action. |
The roots of Facebook's power come from an economic model developed at Google, as Shoshana Zuboff notes in her essay this week. Zuboff, the author of a prescient book that introduced the phrase "surveillance capitalism" to public discourse, is one of the world's leading thinkers on the internet era. She has been working on the difficult questions of democracy in the information age for decades, and she is passionate about the need to make fundamental changes. As she writes, "Discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called 'private.'" |
This week, Zuboff was in Paris for a series of meetings with European elected officials and regulators who, like their counterparts in the United States, are under pressure to come up with better solutions to endless privacy breaches and the unchecked spread of misinformation. We finished the edits for her essay while she was in taxis and hotel rooms, in between dinners, speeches and panels. I hope some of the urgency of those discussions comes through in this compelling and thought-provoking essay. |
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