Surveillance Capitalism

If surveillance capitalism goes on, what will the internet be like?

Imagine walking around in a supermarket, telling your friend about an odd design you saw on a laundry detergent bottle, not even mentioning or even knowing the specific its brand. An hour later, you return home, open Instagram, and immediately see an advertisement of the same exact detergent brand, product, and a link that leads to their website. Imagine someone telling you about a cool character they saw in an online game that they play, and seeing a Facebook advertisement of the same character printed on a beanbag a few hours later. These are true events that happened to me in the past year, and examples of surveillance capitalism that we are experiencing as a society today. Hiding behind service improvement, and personalization for your needs, companies are collecting your data to further produce data for commercial purposes.

If surveillance capitalism goes on, people’s data will be even more exposed than it already is today. With the internet still growing, and with the constant improvement of artificial intelligence technologies, companies are learning more methods to access and manipulate our user data. As this type of surveillance goes on, our data would likely soon enough be visible to people outside of companies, and our privacy would be non-existent. Companies would have more control over us, designing site experiences that we like, knowing us more than we know ourselves.