Surveillance Capitalism

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What Does Surveillance Capitalism Mean?

Surveillance capitalism is a term for the process of profiting from surveilling citizens or consumers. It is often applied to the efforts of companies to market personal data that is gleaned from the internet or mobile devices.

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Techopedia Explains Surveillance Capitalism

The idea behind surveillance capitalism is that private data has value. This idea is gaining steam with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms that take in large amounts of raw data and spit out insights for business. Companies now compete to get these insights by providing the raw data that the programs need through forms of surveillance capitalism.

For example, a company might maintain a website where beacons track customer use down to the very detailed mouse movement and bounce rate statistic. They can also utilize mobile apps that might keep track of where customers are and what they are doing, even when they are not in a store or on a company website.

The more extreme zones of surveillance capitalism raise questions about appropriate security and privacy in today's digital and physical worlds. In general, there is a consensus that new business innovations should be enabled without infringing on people's privacy and civil rights. But there is a large gray area that is being debated now and considered when it comes to using surveillance to generate profit. That is where discussions about surveillance capitalism come into play – the term is useful to describe the limitations and controls placed on enterprise technologies.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.