The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

It is already possible to see a new awakening to empowering collective action, at least in the privacy domain. One example is None of Your Business (NOYB), a nonprofit organization led by privacy activist Max Schrems. After many years of legal contest, Schrems made history in 2015 when his challenge to Facebook’s data-collection and data-retention practices—which he asserted were in violation of EU privacy law—led the Court of Justice of the European Union to invalidate the Safe Harbor agreement that governed data transfers between the US and the EU. In 2018 Schrems launched NOYB as a vehicle for “professional privacy enforcement.” The idea is to push regulators to close the gap between written regulations and corporate privacy practices, leveraging the threat of significant fines to change a company’s actual procedures. NOYB wants to become “a stable European enforcement platform” that unites groups of users and assists them through the litigation process while building coalitions and advancing “targeted and strategic litigation to maximize the impact ‘on the right to privacy.’”26 However this undertaking progresses, the key point for us is the way in which it points to a social void that must be filled with creative new forms of collective action, if the life of the law is to move against surveillance capitalism.