The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

In 2016, for example, the corporation introduced a new Maps app feature called “Driving Mode” that suggests destinations and travel times without users even selecting where they want to go. If you searched for a hammer online, then “Driving Mode” can send you to a hardware store when you buckle up your seat belt. “Google is integrating this ‘push’ technology into its main mobile search app,” reported the Wall Street Journal.69 With this app, Google the “copilot” prompts an individual to turn left and right on a path defined by its continuously accruing knowledge of the person and the context. Predictions about where and why a person might spend money are derived from Google’s exclusive access to behavior surplus and its equally exclusive analytic capabilities: “Eat here.” “Buy this.” Google’s surplus analysis can predict that you are likely to buy an expensive woolen suit, and its real-time location data can trigger the proprietor or advertiser’s real-time prompt, matched to your profile and delivered at the very moment that you are within sight of the flannels, tweeds, and cashmeres. Push and pull, suggest, nudge, cajole, shame, seduce: Google wants to be your copilot for life itself. Each human response to each commercial prompt yields more data to refine into better prediction products. The prompts themselves are bought and paid for in a novel iteration of Google’s online ad markets: real-time, real-world trading in behavioral futures. Your future.