Apps collect data beyond user control while framing collection as enhanced experience

Evidence

Even when we choose to install apps such as Foursquare and thus share data about where we are, the background data aggregation that goes on through Foursquare’s API is largely outside end-user control. Foursquare, at least until the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, had tended to treat information, for example, about the web pages accessed through the app and users’ locations “as non-personal information” except when required otherwise by law; Google’s location API operates, however, without any need for user participation or knowledge. Yet such data acquisition is offered as an enhancement of “experience,” echoing the personalization doublespeak that retail marketers use to justify their intrusion into consumers’ lives. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 517

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘personalization doublespeak’ point connects to the immodesty article’s treatment of how moral vocabularies get repurposed to legitimize social control — here the same mechanism in commercial form.
• XREF: connects to: Apps now colonize even trivial bodily functions like thirst into trackable social data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 23; Privacy and data-ownership debates miss why experience becomes behavioral data at all — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 731; Attention-maximizing technologies can reduce rather than increase user control over attention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 635 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• User consent does not extend to background data aggregation through app APIs #exemplifies (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 517
• Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms #exemplifies (0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 114
• Privacy and data-ownership debates miss why experience becomes behavioral data at all #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 731
• Behavioral data collection succeeded only when conducted without subjects’ awareness #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1352
• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.82)
• Search queries yield collateral behavioral data beyond the key words themselves #exemplifies (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 208
• Attention-maximizing technologies can reduce rather than increase user control over attention #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 635
• Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675