What does privacy mean under surveillance capitalism?
I&#x27;ll start with that I am all for the idea of intellectual privacy and the need for safe guards, but even I could only make it part way through this article (and if these are the people who are supposed to be leading the charge for ethics in AI, we are, surely, screwed).<p>This perspective (and there are many like it), firstly, tries to tie the problem to capitalism as if it&#x27;s the engine that corrupts, and, secondly, tries to equate whats going on to surveillance since we presumably can all agree that surveillance is bad.<p>If you are to make an ass out of yourself or expose something private about yourself in public, its not surveillance if people form opinions about you or gather that information (the lifelock guy and his SSN come to mind - no one would argue his personal information was hacked). I think part of this stems from a bad mental model of what being on the internet is: if Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;other social media are the new town halls or pubic fora, it&#x27;s difficult to consider you can be in public from the privacy of your own home.<p>It is also not some unavoidable aspect of capitalism for your data to be used for potentially nefarious purposes. Consumers are just poorly informed of the transaction that is taking place. To label it &quot;surveillance capitalism&quot; implies that removing the profit motive would mean no one would ever &quot;spy&quot; on you or collect your data. Even a cursory overview of the 20th century or modern China shows how dishonest that implication is.<p>For a quick perspective on the economics of your data, Google reported $160B in revenue on 1B active monthly users in 2019. If google charged each user $13&#x2F;month for access to all it&#x27;s services, it would make the same amount of money. This is on par with a Netflix or Spotify subscription.<p>Should companies be forced to offer some sort of paid tier where your data is not collected? Perhaps. Should consumers be made aware of what they are giving up when they use a certain &quot;free&quot; service? Sure. There are many problems with our current system and our current understanding of things, but one problem that we do not have is being subjugating to the predations of a  &quot;late-stage&quot; &quot;surveillance&quot; capitalist machine.