CODEXCard 8 of 8 · Hidden Architectures of Daily Life
Surveillance capitalism
Your behavior is the raw material for products you'll never see.
Surveillance capitalism is the term Shoshana Zuboff developed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019. It describes companies that gather the traces of how you live online, what you click, where you go, how long you pause, and turn those traces into predictions about your future behavior. Those predictions are then sold.
Zuboff separates this from the older attention model. Advertising on a free channel sells your eyes in the moment. Here the raw material is behavioral data, often collected far beyond what the service needs to work, and the product is a forecast. The buyers can include advertisers and many other kinds of organizations, and their purposes are rarely visible to the person who generated the data.
The mistake is concluding that the only answer is to disconnect from everything. Going fully offline carries real costs at work, in friendships and in daily life. A more workable approach is to choose your trades knowingly. Decide which kinds of data matter most to you, such as location, health or private messages, and protect those with stricter settings or privacy-focused alternatives.
This idea extends the attention economy. You are not only the audience being sold, you are the source of a product built from your own habits.
Example
A free fitness app tracks your runs, your sleep and the times you skip workouts. You only wanted a step counter. Reading the privacy policy, you find it shares activity patterns with partners for advertising and research, so your habits are feeding products you will never see or use.
Try it this week
This week, open the privacy settings of one app that knows your location or health data and switch off sharing you do not need.
From Hidden Architectures of Daily Life (Design & Economics).
