AND THE RISE OF FIRST PARTY CUSTOMER DATA…

"Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.”1

Being generous, the motive for organisations like Google and Facebook covertly capturing and analysing our behavioural data as we navigated the web, was to improve the experience offered to customers by increasing relevance and convenience. After all, the data they captured was of no direct use or interest to the customers themselves, they are a “Data Exhaust” of using the web.

Over time, this data exhaust has delivered a ‘behavioural surplus’ that the big platforms use to develop prediction markets/products that they sell to advertisers. For large amounts of money.

There has been a marked increase in customer awareness that their data is being used to track and manipulate them, without their permission or knowledge and at great profit for the large network providers such as Facebook and Google.

Privacy advocates have been behind these recent developments;

  • General Data Protection Regulation, passed in Europe introduced more transparency and user rights into the gathering of personal data.

  • Google announced it would effectively remove the use of third-party cookies to track user movements around the web (which may help their search business but makes targeting by others more difficult). This move was recently delayed until 2023.

  • Regulation granting customers control of their data held by service providers, Consumer Data Rights, has added a further level of self-determination for customers.

  • The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has taken the Surveillance Capitalism industry to court, claiming it is responsible for the largest data breach ever, a direct challenge to the business of auctioning purloined customer data to the highest bidder.

"15 June 2021. Dublin. Online advertising causes the world’s biggest data breach. Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) is going to court in Germany to stop it. ICCL’s lawsuit takes aim at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Verizon, AT&T, and the entire online advertising and tracking industry, by challenging industry rules.

Included in hundreds of pages of evidence is the industry rulebook for building secret dossiers about every person. These dossiers can include your mental health conditions, financial situation, and even whether your child has special needs.

The private things we do online are collected from a vast online advertising system that operates behind the scenes on virtually every website and app. This online advertising system, called “Real-Time Bidding” (RTB), is a central target of ICCL’s lawsuit.

RTB broadcasts personal data about us to thousands of companies. Though RTB data can contain very sensitive information, industry documents also confirm that there are no technical measures to limit what companies can do with this information, nor who they pass it on to.”