spot_img
28.4 C
Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

Returning the favor

- Advertisement -

Using location tracking and mapping technology, players catch Pokémon characters in real locations. The objective, as well as the fun, is in physically going to the area to capture them. As players walk around the real world, pocket monsters (Pokémon) appear on the game map. And players catch the monsters by throwing Poke balls at them. 

Introduced in 2016, the globally popular game app was seen as harmless and fun. To a certain extent, it was somewhat commended for nudging people to move around, for increasing physical activity, and for encouraging people to explore their neighborhood and community.

While everybody was having fun, hardly anybody noticed that it had been an effective way to influence and change human behavior, and to collect vast amounts of data from millions of people.

Harvard Business School Emerita Shoshana Zuboff wrote that while the use of the app is free, technology firms have found a way of turning our behavior into “raw material that can be used to make predictions about our future behavior.”

In her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she cites Pokémon Go as one example of a new form of capitalism. This new form “trades predictions about our seemingly innocuous behavior, such as where we’ll go, what we’ll see on our way and what we’ll do, for profit.”

- Advertisement -

Surveillance capitalism exists in a market where “the commodity for sale is our personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance of the internet.” This is performed by companies that provide us with free online services.

Google captures and analyzes the trend of our searches; Amazon and Apple track our browsing and purchase history, while Facebook remembers which photo we liked or disliked, even that feed or meme that we spend a second longer looking at. These data are collected and controlled, and are used to produce “behavior prediction products” that can be used for commercial purposes. This is done without our knowledge that they were doing it and without our understanding of the extent of what they were doing with it.

It is not anymore sending us a recommendation or targeting us with online advertising. Rather, the “real-time flow” of our daily lives is being sold to third-party corporations for profit. The jeans we bought, the coffee we drank, where we go after work and on holidays, the people we know and those we interact with. These are all turned into something that can be monetized, primarily for directly influence and modify our behavior.

In the case of Pokémon Go, “in choosing where to place the Pokestops where the creatures gather, the company was able to ‘herd game players to specific places: establishments, bars, restaurants, pizza joints, service establishments, places where they might fix your car, or retail shops.’”

In Facebook, subliminal cues are fed into News Feed and on Facebook pages. Results show that one, they can modify real-world behavior. And two, it can be done “while bypassing user’s awareness.”

Just recently, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation of a “whole range of apps that people use to which they’re feeding very intimate data.” These include health and fitness apps that are built in sensor-based wearables. Smart watches, fitness trackers, microphones, cameras, temperature and motion sensors, and others are data sources that are increasing the quantity and variety of available data.

In 2015, Zuboff’s paper “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” quotes an anonymous data scientist, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us.”

We were using free services. In turn, we were being used as raw materials for free.  As one scientist put it, “we are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” 

Hal Varian, chief economist of Google, Inc. and University of California Emeritus Professor of Economics is quoted, “… everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great… ”

Apparenty, we’re returning the favor.  
 

Real Carpio So lectures at the Ramon del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He is an entrepreneur and a management consultant. Comments are welcomed at realwalksonwater@gmail.com. Archives can be accessed at realwalksonwater.wordpress.com. The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.

- Advertisement -

LATEST NEWS

Popular Articles