Google links - the market forced it to become of a surveillant capitalist nature, leading to the bidding of control regarding human clients and their data
Google links - the market forced it to become of a surveillant capitalist nature, leading to the bidding of control regarding human clients and their data
Cong ’18 [Wanshu; September 30; Faculty of Law at European University Institute - Department of Law (LAW), Global Academic Fellow at The University of Hong Kong; “Privacy and Data Protection: Solving or Reproducing the Democratic Crisis of the Neoliberal Capitalism?” p. 16] SPark
Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism starts fromGoogle’s discovery of the surplus value of users’ behavioural dataand its expansion of the digitalization of human life. To see how dramatic and transformative the discovery is, we cannot forget the anti-commercialism and cyber liberalism embraced by Google in its early days. Chastising advertiser-sponsored search engines for their inherent biases towards advertisers, Google advocated for dispassionate algorithms that offered better search results by learning from users’ search-related data. 32 However, due to the increasing pressure from investors in the market, the company could not remain only user-facing because only generating good search results does not make revenues. But completely relying on the sponsorship of advertisers would compromise the search results and cause damage to user experience and trust. The magic shift Google made was, like a matchmaker, to provide the ads that could be useful and informative for users. The matchmaking was done with Google’s sophisticated analytical capacities to measure the quality of the landing page of the ad, the relevance of the ad to the search terms or keywords, and above all the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad appeared on a result page. 33 The latter two factors are largely analyses ofusers’ behavioural data which Google held in great amount. Meanwhile, Google was running an auction-like system – the AdWords – where advertisers bid for the slots on the search result pages to show their ads, and the slots would be given by Google’s rank formula that combined the quality scores and the bids.
