Google and Facebook manipulation is out of control

Giants of the IT industry turn human actions into a commodity. They quietly control every step of the user and control his behavior. The system of collecting information and subsequent manipulations is new capitalism. And to control its development more and more difficult.

On the phenomenon of new business models built on the basis of surveillance, says the researcher at Harvard Business School Shoshanna Zuboff. In her book, The Age of Supervision-Capitalism, she describes the principles by which modern IT giants work.

As the expert explains, people initially understood the terms of the transaction they were making. We share data with companies, and they provide us with services for free. However, over time, the situation has changed. Companies began to consider not only data free but also the people who generate them. The era of total monitoring and control over user behavior has arrived.

Corporations are enriched at the expense of the person — they examine it, examine it under a magnifying glass, and then train the algorithms based on this data. As a result, Google and Facebook create tools for manipulation and speculation under the guise of forecasting systems. Under the supervision of capitalism, the main object of trade is the personal experience of a person who, as it turned out, can operate on the market.

At the same time, most users are not aware of how deeply IT giants explore their preferences and interests. Each search query, like, post, geolocation, photo, video and even a punctuation mark is “fed” to machine learning based algorithms. It is not surprising that even the innocent Challenge “I am 10 years ago”, which began to spread on Facebook and Instagram, was taken for a deliberate move launched by social networks to train AI.

Society in these conditions is divided into guards and supervised. Such an “asymmetry of knowledge” leads to a “asymmetry of power”. And people do not have any levers of control, because supervision-capitalism is not regulated at all.

Expect that corporations will engage in self-regulation is not worth it. Preservation of the existing system for them is the key to survival.

nanonewsnet.ru