Dark data rhetoric supplies the moral and legal rationale for capturing unpredicted behavior

Evidence

In this way the notion of “dark data” handily becomes the “data exhaust” of ubiquitous computing. It provides the moral, technical, commercial, and legal rationale for powerful systems of machine intelligence that can capture and analyze behaviors and conditions never intended for a public life. For those who seek surveillance revenues, dark data represent lucrative and necessary territories in the dynamic universal jigsaw constituted by surveillance capitalism’s urge toward scale, scope, and action. Thus, the technology community casts dark data as the intolerable “unknown unknown” that threatens the financial promise of the “internet of things.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the first-phase ‘data exhaust’ dispossession narrative from earlier chapters — same legitimating structure. — connects to: The rhetoric of dark data frames all un-datafied behavior as a threat requiring capture — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 655; Behavioral data captured passively is held to be more truthful than self-revelation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1346

Broader Connections

• Behavioral data captured passively is held to be more truthful than self-revelation #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1346