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The new Empire of Surveillance Capitalism

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EScholar: Electronic Academic Papers for Scholars

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Author:

(1) Angelica Sofia Valeriani, Ethics of Information Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.

Table of Links

1 Introduction

2 The new Empire of Surveillance Capitalism

3 Target Advertisement

4 Military technology and Politics

5 Focus on Ethical Frameworks

5.1 Utilitarian Framework

5.2 Deontology Framework

5.3 Direct comparison between Utilitarianism and Deontology

6 Conclusions, Acknowledgements, and References

2 The new Empire of Surveillance Capitalism

The wide spread of the Internet brought to the current society in which the major means of generating wealth on the Internet and through proprietary platforms (as apps) is the surveillance of the population. This phenomenon allows to increase exponentially gains from the digitalized companies that have the monopoly of society. Digitalization of surveillance has radically changed the nature of advertising. Now, the implication of the system is the absence of effective privacy. Revelations of Edward Snowden on NSA’s Prism of 2013 are an example of the pattern of a tight interweaving of the military with giant computer-Internet corporations. There are many examples of partly cooperative, partly legally coerced sharing of data that can be found in the case of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and others. These companies turned over the data from tens of thousands of their accounts on individuals every six months both to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, with a fast rise in the number of accounts turned over to the secret government [1]. In practice, according to revelations, NSA gained access to data from mobile phones emanating from hundreds of millions of Americans as well as populations abroad—operating thorough Boundless Informant, Prism, and other secret projects. The final goal was to capitalize on new military technology and create larger global Internet monopolies while expanding the military-digital interchange system. In the context of capitalization, an example of the trend that well represents the centralized structure of monopoly-finance capital in the age of digital surveillance is given by the practice of “securitization” increasingly standing simultaneously for a world dominated by the elements identified in [1, 3]. In detail:


  1. Financial derivatives trading


  2. A network of public and private surveillance


  3. The militarization of security-control systems


  4. The removal of judicial processes from effective civilian control


Surveillance can be simply seen as a collection of techniques that together potentially constitute subjects to regulation (first interpretation), as well as attention purposeful, systematic, and oriented to social control (second interpretation). While totalitarian regimes may embrace the second definition, seeing Surveillance as an instrument to strengthen their control over people, capitalist and democratic systems may value Surveillance more for reasons connected to its rationality, potentialities in terms of welfare, and good sense. On the whole, it must be noticed anyway that Surveillance must be contextualized also in its economic implications and this is more than a way of social control [2]. One of the greatest issues that are connected to Surveillance Capitalism, as also shown in the core phenomenons of the paper, i.e. target advertising and coercive manipulation, is the asymmetry in


Fig. 1. Categorization of main Surveillance fields. Security-control systems, public and private surveillance, AI applications in legal courts and financial services.

Fig. 1. Categorization of main Surveillance fields. Security-control systems, public and private surveillance, AI applications in legal courts and financial services.


the distribution of power that is generated by the retrieval of data of people unaware of this process (known and discussed following some whistle-blowers revelations). The weight of this power is concentrated in the hands of the actors that have access and can manage the information that is retrieved [3].


This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED license.


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