Platform data sharing ruined personal moments without consent

Evidence

I purchased a diamond engagement ring set from overstock in preparation for a New Year’s surprise for my girlfriend.… Within hours, I received a shocking call from one of my best friends of surprise and “congratulations” for getting engaged.(!!!) Imagine my horror when I learned that overstock had published the details of my purchase (including a link to the item and its price) on my public Facebook newsfeed, as well as notifications to all of my friends. ALL OF MY FRIENDS, including my girlfriend, and all of her friends, etc.… ALL OF THIS WAS WITHOUT MY CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE. I am totally distressed that my surprise was ruined, and what was meant to be something special and a lifetime memory for my girlfriend and I was destroyed by a totally underhanded and infuriating privacy invasion. I want to wring the neck of the folks at overstock and facebook who thought that this was a good idea. It sets a terrible precedent on the net, and I feel that it ruined a part of my life. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 149

Categorization

• CANDY: A vivid, humanizing concrete anecdote of an early surveillance-capitalism failure — good elevator-conversation material.
• SHARE: Good to send to someone interested in the early Facebook Beacon controversies and data privacy history.
• XREF: connects to: Individual attempts to control online identity fail because others disclose without sharing one’s boundaries — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 636; User consent does not extend to background data aggregation through app APIs — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 517; Surveillance capitalism has destroyed the vision of body data serving intimacy — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 772 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. #exemplifies (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854
• Surveillance capitalism has destroyed the vision of body data serving intimacy #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 772
• Surveillance capitalism mines intimate personality and emotional data for profit #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 624
• Social sharing of behavioral data abolishes individual privacy in favor of group truth #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1393
• Surveillance erodes interpersonal trust by removing the right to act without it #expands (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 503
• Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data #expands (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675
• Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self #expands (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 75