Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy

Abstract

This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social benefits of online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy.

The social imaginaries of data activism

“…Drawing from critical political economy and neo-Foucauldian analyses, researchers have explored the effects of datafication on the economy, politics, social life and self-understanding, with particular attention to how technical innovation is outrunning both public understanding and regulation (Kennedy, 2018;Zuboff, 2015). Research highlights how the introduction of technologies as corrective measures to address identified societal problems leads to new issues that, in turn, need to be corrected: for example, the data economy practices that initiatives like MyData are currently trying to fix were originally justified with a jubilant discourse of the political and societal benefits of online services (West, 2019).…”

Making Sense of Africa's Emerging Digital Transformation and its Many Futures

“…Data capitalism describes the production and trade of data bundles by, for example, combining existing data elements in novel ways or manufacturing and mining data from market and non-market behavior (West, 2017). The efforts to broadly legitimize and use data as a new commodity on the African continent produces unprecedented ways for economic value creation and, in consequence, generates new economic environments.…”

Invisible Pixels Are Dead, Long Live Invisible Pixels!

“…In the early days of the Internet the term "web bug" referred to simple techniques with which unobtrusive user tracking was implemented in the world wide web. Together with web cookies, which were first standardized in 1997, these web bugs were an important historical factor shaping the developments that have continued to deteriorate privacy in the world wide web for two decades [22,42]. Typically these web bugs were one-pixel-by-one-pixel images embedded to a given website but hosted from a different third-party website.…”