Digital protest platforms covertly harvest signatories’ data for commercial profit

Evidence

Qualms turn to disquiet when the fine print informs anyone who uses the site that their personal information may be passed on to the person/organization initiating the petition; further, it may also be shared with third parties, may be disclosed to authorities or other legal petitioners, and may even be sold under certain circumstances. In other words, perhaps unwittingly, Simon Johnson is exposing those who sign on to his petition to all the usual dangers of data aggregation, surveillance, and analysis familiar from the long history of high-volume for-profit direct mail operations. Johnson’s “protest” orchestrates the harvesting of information for private profit and political machinations, precipitating an asymmetry, weakening the movement in the name of symbolic action. Furthermore, although Jamie Dimon will never ever be ousted by any such petition, or similar symbolic political activity, thousands of people will enter their names into a database archiving the expressed hostility to the banksters, and someone, somewhere, is making a profit. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 911

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying whether the specific petition site’s data-resale terms are as described, and which site Johnson used.
• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how protest is absorbed into market logics, echoing critiques of clicktivism and the social-media panopticon in surveillance-capitalism literature. — connects to: Neoliberal markets pre-optimize and monetize protest identities for profit — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 912; Protesters are designing anticounter-surveillance tools against surveillance capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1562; Surveillance capitalists deliberately conceal how their platforms monetize user behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1411 (+5 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘digital protest as a surveillance honeypot’ — how online petitions and symbolic actions convert dissent into a monetizable dataset.

Broader Connections

• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297
• Surveillance capitalists deliberately conceal how their platforms monetize user behavior #exemplifies (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1411
• Surveillance capitalists self-authorize the right to modify user behavior for profit #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 933
• Citizens resist surveillance by hiding from both the state and corporate data extractors #exemplifies (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1560
• Protesters are designing anticounter-surveillance tools against surveillance capitalism #contradicts (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1562
• Surveillance-capitalism theory understates what digital platforms actually do #qualifies (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 905