Private corporate data collection only rivaled state capacity in the 1970s-80s.

Evidence

First, the key actors in developing social knowledge and social statistics in this earlier period operated, with few exceptions, at the state’s initiative (an exception would be the data-gathering of the commercial insurance industry). It was not until the 1970s and 1980s in the United States that large private companies (marketers) acquired a data-collection capacity to rival that of the state. As a result, the data collectors of that earlier period necessarily faced some requirements for public accountability in how data was collected, categories adopted, and results applied. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s data colonialism frame: the shift from state to corporate data collection is central to why platform power differs from state biopolitics.