Review | Three books on privacy in the digital age – if our lives are lived publicly online, what remains personal?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, explores how our data is used for corporate profit, Sarah E. Igo’s The Known Citizen looks at Americans’ perception of privacy, and The Lost Family, by Libby Copeland, studies the ethics of genetic testing
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books
In the digital sphere, the cliché runs, if you didn’t pay for it, you are the product. But that’s not quite correct. In her provocative book about “surveillance capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff compares tech platforms such as Google and Facebook to elephant poachers and says we are the carcass. “The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.”
The author explains that surveillance capitalism is a new economic order that relies on the theft of our private experiences for raw data sold to businesses. These companies then create “prediction products” anticipating how we will act. In what she calls behavioural futures markets, the winners are the surveillance capitalists who feed on “digital exhaust” – jargon for leftovers – that can be recycled for profit.
To map its beginnings the author returns to the dotcom bubble, when Google’s prediction products were aimed at targeted advertising. In no time digital infrastructures were being used to provide a God’s eye view of ourselves, leading to automated processes shaping our behaviour for commercial ends. Think Pokémon GO, the hugely successful game app that grew from Google Maps.
This book is a keeper, not least to remind us how it was before and after rogue capitalists staged their coup, assaulting our autonomy so deftly that we didn’t even realise we were being robbed.
The Known Citizen by Sarah E. Igo, Harvard University Press
Sarah Igo takes what she calls a “panoramic approach” to explain why privacy has become of such concern to Americans, in the process showing how expectations of the personal have changed.
Borrowing its title from W.H. Auden’s 1940 satirical poem Unknown Citizen, her thought-provoking book looks back at the work of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, two lawyers whose 1890 Harvard Law Review essay “The Right to Privacy” continues to excite debate about the right to be left alone. Fast forward to 1965 and Griswold v Connecticut, which resulted in the US Supreme Court ruling the state’s birth-control law unjustifiably invaded marital bedrooms.
The author also examines how Americans have used the concept of privacy to try to restrict information about everything from their shopping habits to online searches to health and relationships. One key area of interest is the growing tension between our desire for privacy and need to be seen. Because contemporary confessional culture values self-revelation, the flip side is also true – there’s shame in concealment, not only in America, of course.
The notion of privacy is nuanced in a “knowing society”, which governs its members, Igo argues, by understanding them more fully. The rewards and risks wrestle on shifting sands.
The Lost Family by Libby Copeland, Abrams Press
In matters of privacy, the dead should also be considered. Libby Copeland urges us to consider the sanctity of their secrets in her book, which warns about the rise in direct-to-the-consumer genetic testing: databases of people who subscribed to at-home DNA testing grew from 8 million in 2017 to 30 million in 2019, although the figure could be three times that now, she writes.
Copeland, a journalist, says hers is the story of “seekers” curious about their identity. That much is true, although readers interested in the subject will probably have heard similar tales elsewhere. More compelling is her writing about the ethics behind genealogical investigations, especially when, in choosing to give up their privacy, individuals relinquish that of others.
Then there’s “artifact testing”, the next big thing. Companies such as MyHeritage say it will soon be possible to extract DNA from saliva on old envelopes, say, or stamps, although the question of consent will surely spark further debate: people who are no longer around cannot give the thumbs up to signal their approval.
