Freelancers trade personal surveillance for faster guaranteed payment.
Evidence
Remote desktop surveillance. This method includes systems such as those used by online staffing platform Upwork to keep an eye on freelancers doing work from home (about a third of the US workforce). The system, installed voluntarily by the freelancers, takes pictures of their desktops at random times and tracks their minute-by-minute activity, including keystroke and mouse movement (are they checking personal email? posting on Facebook?). This is a way for clients to make sure workers are not “wasting time,” and freelancers face pressure to accept this level of surveillance because doing so guarantees that they will be paid immediately after the job is done, while refusing might mean having to wait a long time for a client to pay an invoice. In other words, submission to surveillance is directly tied to economic benefits. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 232
Categorization
- XREF: Illustrates the ‘surveillance for economic benefit’ exchange central to data-colonialism and platform-labor literatures the reader tracks. — connects to: Automated personalization exploits economic insecurity to extract surveillance forfeitures — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 802; Surveillance is outsourced to unwitting casual laborers in exposed jobs — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 173; Digital surveillance works because people voluntarily expose themselves — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 32
Broader Connections
- Automated personalization exploits economic insecurity to extract surveillance forfeitures
#complicates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 802 - Digital surveillance works because people voluntarily expose themselves
#exemplifies(0.82) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 32 - Surveillance is outsourced to unwitting casual laborers in exposed jobs
#expands(0.80) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 173