Surveillance Capitalism

The Challenge

Surveillance capitalism represents a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales. This system of economic exploitation has profound implications for democracy, privacy, and social cohesion. Key concerns include:

• Pervasive Tracking: Ubiquitous data collection across digital platforms, devices, and physical spaces creates comprehensive behavioral profiles of individuals without meaningful consent.
• Prediction Products: Personal data is processed to create detailed prediction products that anticipate behavior, enabling manipulation of individual choices and actions.
• Micro-Targeted Influence: Granular behavioral data enables precisely targeted content, including misinformation and propaganda, that can manipulate public opinion and undermine democratic discourse.
• Power Asymmetry: The concentration of behavioral data in a few corporations creates unprecedented power imbalances between platforms and users, as well as between data-rich and data-poor entities.

Our Approach

The Global Tech Governance Institute takes a comprehensive approach to addressing surveillance capitalism:

• Tracking Transparency: Developing tools and methodologies to make surveillance practices visible and understandable to the public, policymakers, and researchers.
• Regulatory Frameworks: Researching and proposing governance models that effectively limit exploitative data practices while enabling beneficial data uses.
• Alternative Business Models: Exploring and promoting alternative digital business models that don't rely on surveillance and behavioral prediction for revenue.
• Democratic Safeguards: Developing policy approaches to protect democratic processes from manipulation through micro-targeted influence operations.

Current Initiatives

Our work in this area currently includes:

Matrix Integration

Key Publications