What is sold is not only our personal information; it is our attention, our hesitations and the probabilities of our future behaviour. Some part of our life should be able to remain in a darkness that is not measured, not predicted and not sold.
Imagine walking into a shop and leaving without buying anything. Which shelf we looked at, how many seconds we stood before a product, which label we read while wrinkling our face, and what passed through our mind on the way out are not in the shopkeeper’s hands. In the physical world, at least, not every movement turns automatically into a record. In the digital world, even the button we did not touch can be meaningful. Where we paused, what we scrolled past quickly, at what hour of the night we woke, and which word we typed and deleted can become small parts of the great prediction machine built about us.
The concept of surveillance capitalism tells us that this regime of recording is not merely a matter of security or advertising. Human experience is gathered like raw material; the data extracted from our behaviour are used to predict what we will do next and, where possible, to push our behaviour in a particular direction. What is sold here is not only our personal information. Our attention, our habits, our hesitations and the probabilities of our future behaviour are converted into economic value. While we receive a service, a new product about us is continually produced in the background.
More than being watched
When we hear “surveillance” we usually picture a camera observing us. Yet the real power of digital surveillance lies less in watching individual moments than in combining them. A location record may be ordinary on its own. Combined with search history, purchase information, sleeping hours, message traffic and one’s circle of friends, a detailed map of our way of life emerges. Relations that people do not know, have forgotten or have told no one about can be inferred from the links between data.
In this system no official needs to sit before a screen watching us constantly. Classification is automatic. Probabilities are produced: “may be looking for a new home,” “inclined to change jobs,” “high likelihood of borrowing,” “may react to this message.” The prediction may be right or wrong. In either case the consequences are real: the price, advertisement, news item or offer placed before us may change. A decision about us may rest on a profile we have never seen.
The invisible contract of the free service
That many digital services ask for no money renders the economic relation between us invisible. As users we take ourselves for customers; yet for the parties who provide the platform’s income, our attention and behavioural predictions are the real value. The phrase “you are the product” states the matter crudely but leaves it incomplete. A human being is not an object that is sold; what is marketed is the possibility of reaching and influencing their behaviour.
No real bargaining takes place in this exchange. The terms of the service arrive before us and we accept; usually we have neither another option nor time to assess the text. Moreover we cannot know which conclusions will be drawn from the data in future. A record that looks trivial today may become sensitive information tomorrow when combined with a different dataset. Consent, therefore, cannot be treated as unlimited permission granted once.
When predicting behaviour is not enough
If a company can predict which product we will buy, it can show its advertisement at the right moment. But as competition advances, prediction alone ceases to suffice; changing behaviour is more valuable. Notifications, recommendations, rankings, rewards and personally arranged feeds come into play here. The system does not force us to do anything. It changes the arrangement of the options before us, feeds certain emotions, and creates a sense of haste or lack.
This influence is not always successful; human behaviour is not wholly calculable. Even so, moving a small share of millions of people in a particular direction can have large commercial or political consequences. And we usually do not notice which behaviour is being encouraged. The boundary blurs between advertisement and recommendation, between what is popular and what is promoted, between our own desire and a designed impulse. Power works less through the harshness of prohibition than through the tuning of the environment.
Privacy is not a matter for those with something to hide
In debates about surveillance one often hears “I have nothing to hide.” The sentence links privacy with crime. Yet we need not commit a crime in order to close our door. A person develops freely when they can be alone, can make mistakes, can change their mind and know that not every act becomes a permanent record. When we think we are constantly watched, we avoid not only wrongdoing but also the unusual.
Privacy is not an individual luxury but one of the conditions of social freedom. For a dissenting thought to germinate, for an insecure worker to organise, for a young person to explore their identity or for someone to ask a question they are not yet sure about, a space in which one can remain unseen is required. Where everything is measured, conformity is rewarded and deviation becomes a risk. “Something to hide” is sometimes not a crime but a thought that does not yet resemble the majority’s.
Is another digital economy possible?
Criticising surveillance capitalism is not rejecting all use of data. Data can be useful in traffic planning, scientific research, health services and in developing products people genuinely want. The decisive question is by whom, for what purpose and within which limits data are used. Can people see, delete and object to the purpose of the data collected about them? Must they consent to unlimited monitoring of their behaviour in order to use a service? Does the value gathered return to society?
Paid but non-tracking services, designs that minimise data collection, on-device processing, common ownership and strong rights of deletion may be parts of other models. These could make digital life no longer free of charge, or require us to give up certain conveniences. But we are paying today as well; we merely think it cheap because we do not see the bill in money.
The success of surveillance capitalism lies in presenting itself as the natural flow of life. The phone opens, the application runs, an advertisement arrives, and we go on our way. In the background, however, stands an order that continually converts human experience into a resource. Objecting to that order is not fleeing technology; it is a reminder that not every moment of a human life belongs to the market. Some part of our life should be able to remain in a darkness that is not measured, not predicted and not sold. Freedom sometimes breathes precisely where no one is looking.