State regulators extracted trivial fines from Google while trusting voluntary self-policing on data privacy.

Evidence

The thirty-eight attorneys general did not fare much better. When the group’s leader, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, issued a civil investigative demand (equivalent to a subpoena) to get access to the infamous private data, “Google ignored it.” The company finally agreed to settle with the states in 2013, accepting a mere $7 million fine and a series of agreements regarding “aggressive” self-policing. The New York Times announced that Google had finally admitted that “it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project, when it casually scooped up… personal information,” as if this scandal had been the only contested element in the whole affair. State officials crowed that “the industry giant… is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy.” In light of the fact that the extraction imperative is what makes this giant a giant, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the confidence of the attorneys general in Google’s commitment to privacy self-regulation. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the dispossession-cycle logic from previous chapters: extraction is constitutive of the business, so self-regulation of extraction is structurally self-contradictory.