Google treats data collection as a vital supply line to defend at all costs

Evidence

Google fiercely defends threatened supply routes. Any disruption of its extraction operations and its exclusive claims to raw material is the line that cannot be breached. In 2009 Android manufacturer Motorola chose to replace Google’s free location services with those of Skyhook Wireless, which, Motorola believed, produced more-reliable results. A Google product manager admitted Skyhook’s superiority but expressed his concerns in an e-mail to a Google executive, noting that if other manufacturers switched to Skyhook, it “would be awful for Google, because it will cut off our ability to continue collecting data” for the company’s Wi-Fi location database. Court documents from Skyhook’s eventual lawsuit against Motorola (and Samsung) include an e-mail from Google’s senior vice president of Mobile to Motorola’s CEO, insisting that the interruption of Google’s data collection was a “stop-ship issue.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the foundational thesis of the book itself: behavioral surplus as raw material for surveillance capitalism. Also echoes the extractive-economy metaphor Zuboff builds throughout. — connects to: Google erected four defensive arenas to protect its unregulated behavioral surplus — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 390

Broader Connections

• Google erected four defensive arenas to protect its unregulated behavioral surplus #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 390