Tenant-screening firms scrape private social media data without contest or appeal.

Evidence

Another example of surveillance-as-a-service is a firm that sells deep vetting of potential employees and tenants to employers and landlords. For instance, a prospective tenant receives a demand from her potential landlord that requires her to grant full access to all social media profiles. The service then “scrapes your site activity,” including entire conversation threads and private messages, runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software, and finally spits out a report that catalogues everything from your personality to your “financial stress level,” including exposing protected status information such as pregnancy and age. There is no opportunity for affected individuals to view or contest information. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 541

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how formalized ‘opt-in’ consent launders coercion when the alternative is homelessness or unemployment.
• XREF: connects to: Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854; A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872; Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 607

Broader Connections

• A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872
• Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854
• Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 607