Corporations advance surveillance incrementally and furtively rather than all at once

Evidence

Meanwhile, Google maintained the pledge that had been critical to the FTC’s approval of its 2001 acquisition of the ad-tracking behemoth DoubleClick when it agreed not to combine data from the tracking network with other personally identifiable information in the absence of a user’s opt-in consent. In this case, Google appears to have waited for Facebook to extend the surveillance capitalist frontier and bear the brunt of incursion and habituation. Later, in the summer of 2016, Google crossed that frontier with an announcement that a user’s DoubleClick browsing history “may be” combined with personally identifiable information from Gmail and other Google services. Its promised opt-in function for this new level of tracking was presented with the headline “Some new features for your Google account.” One privacy scholar characterized the move as the final blow to the last “tiny semblance” of privacy on the web. A coalition of privacy groups presented a new complaint to the FTC, implicitly recognizing the logic of the dispossession cycle: “Google has done incrementally and furtively what would plainly be illegal if done all at once.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 501

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the dispossession cycle mechanism: incremental incursion legitimizes what would be illegal if done in one step.
• XREF: Connects to Zamyatin’s ‘We’ and Zuboff’s broader argument that privacy erosion proceeds by gradual habituation. — connects to: New surveillance technologies are deliberately disguised in familiar forms to ease adoption. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 488; Surveillance capitalism emerged gradually and initially read as incidental corporate missteps — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 51; Surveillance capital firms cycle through incursion, habituation, retreat, and recamouflaged pursuit. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1081

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism emerged gradually and initially read as incidental corporate missteps #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 51