Shoshana Zuboff
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- November 2020
Shoshana Zuboff is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power published in 2019. In her book, she details the concept of “surveillance capitalism” where users and their data are a commodity that is bought and sold by corporations, essentially using us as currency rather than consumers.
Surveillance capitalism occurs at a level we don’t have access to. For example, the New York Times published an article about how Target was able to predict that a teenage girl was pregnant by tracking her behavior online and subsequently sent her advertisements for baby related items. This specific event has been disputed, but the concept is frighteningly real.
Zuboff’s life’s work has been focused on the current digital revolution, also known as the Third Industrial Revolution, and how it affects capitalism and human development. The reduction of the individual to what she calls a “surveillance dividend” is a concept that fuels tech giants’ desires to collect, buy, and sell our information.
Researchers like Zuboff are crucial to us in this era of unknown and poorly understood technological power and help us understand the social impact of the technology we use as well as bring awareness to egregious overstepping of personal privacy boundaries performed by tech companies. Collective problems like these require collective action and in order to stand up for our privacy rights, we have to first understand our enemy.
