Why big tech snoop on us
Year 9 to 12 students, parents, and teachers
Surveillance capitalism began at the turn of the century, when investors behind Google pressured the then idealistic founders to get their act together and make some money for them. The realisation that the streams of data being collected on their search engine users could be monetised changed everything. Almost overnight, the Internet became a ginormous cash cow, which drove all major players to commercialise. Their business model was and is—to provide a service for free and make the user the creator of valuable data (their digital footprint— by analysing our emails, logging our searches and our browsing clickstreams and mining our online activity). For example, Facebook gathers as much data as possible on you, the user, packages it, so it becomes useful to advertisers and sells it to the highest bidder over and over again. This enabled anyone to personalise their ads/posts to target individual users, vastly improving their ROI (return on investment). But there is more to it—all this data collected on us is now analysed by ever-more sophisticated ‘black-box’ algorithms of immense complexity. So complex that no human can grasp its internal workings, but despite this, it creates personal outcomes on individual users that are predictive of what you may want next, even before you know it yourself. Finely tailored posts are then sent to further foster this yet unconscious desire in you to ensure a sale or to convince you of something, or rather.
Source: Own writing based on numerous sources.
Question: How can you be sure that an idea or a want/need comes from you and is not prompted by technology?
Casper Pieters PhD Dip Ed is an author and educator who uses adventure narratives to enliven the ICT curriculum for young people. www.casperpieters.com
