Google’s secrecy was necessary to hide its unilateral seizure of user data
Evidence
What might the response have been back then if the public were told that Google’s magic derived from its exclusive capabilities in unilateral surveillance of online behavior and its methods specifically designed to override individual decision rights? Google policies had to enforce secrecy in order to protect operations that were designed to be undetectable because they took things from users without asking and employed those unilaterally claimed resources to work in the service of others’ purposes. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 282
Categorization
- SEED: The counterfactual—what if the public had known Google’s magic was surveillance?—frames a compelling essay on the epistemology of the platform economy’s founding.
- SHARE: For someone studying Google’s early history or the intellectual history of surveillance.
- XREF: connects to: Google’s patents explicitly aimed to circumvent users’ decision rights over their data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 249; Google institutionalized secrecy to sustain behavioral surplus extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 279; Google deliberately hid its data collection practices from users — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 534
Broader Connections
- Google institutionalized secrecy to sustain behavioral surplus extraction
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 279