FTC enforcement against surveillance capitalism cannot succeed because market-imperative mandates trump compliance

Evidence

This solid achievement paved the way for the adaptation stage of the dispossession cycle, when in late November 2011, Facebook consented to a settlement with the FTC over charges that it had systematically “deceived consumers by telling them that they could keep their Facebook information private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” The complaint brought by EPIC and a coalition of privacy advocates in 2009 initiated an FTC investigation that yielded plenty of evidence of the corporation’s broken promises. These included website changes that made private information public, third-party access to users’ personal data, leakage of personal data to third-party apps, a “verified apps” program in which nothing was verified, enabling advertisers to access personal information, allowing access to personal data after accounts were deleted, and violations of the Safe Harbor Framework, which governs data transfers between the United States and the EU. In the parallel universe of surveillance capitalism, each one of these violations was worthy of a five-star rating from the extraction imperative. … The FTC order barred the company from making further privacy misrepresentations, required users’ affirmative consent to new privacy policies, and mandated a comprehensive privacy program to be audited every two years for twenty years. … But Leibowitz was not up against a company; he was up against a new market form with distinct and intractable imperatives whose mandates can be fulfilled only at the expense of user privacy. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 499

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader surveillance-capitalism thesis that firms’ behavioral-surplus extraction imperatives override legal/regulatory constraint — a theme central to the book’s foundational argument. — connects to: Antitrust regulation will not curb surveillance-capitalist extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 420; US law’s surveillance-capitalist allegiance may not be permanent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 190

Broader Connections

• Antitrust regulation will not curb surveillance-capitalist extraction #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 420
• US law’s surveillance-capitalist allegiance may not be permanent #qualifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 190