Willing personal tracking normalizes tracking as infrastructure in less voluntary domains

Evidence

Even if this banal trust in data-hungry devices seems harmless, there is the risk of function creep: the more we become used to tracking as the natural way to find out what to do in our personal lives, the more likely we will be to accept tracking as the infrastructure for knowledge in areas of our lives in which we have long expected less control, such as work. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the ‘function creep’ and creep-of-surveillance arguments familiar from the attention/surveillance school — a calibration point for the rival frame. — connects to: Large social platforms function as aggregators of niche tracking services — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 542; Voluntariness of self-tracking does not blunt its extractive function — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 512; Self-tracking autonomy comes at the cost of permanent submission to external data systems — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 516 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The core mechanism — that voluntary self-tracking habituates people to accept tracking as default knowledge infrastructure in coercive domains — is dense enough to anchor an entire comparative essay on how the data-colonialism frame explains platform power.

Broader Connections

• Extraction imperative forces relentless automated tracking and framing experience as free raw material #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1067
• Surveillance capitalism exploits both extraction and our voluntary surrender via interfaces #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 734