Electronic surveillance

Facebook under fire, but it’s just part of ‘surveillance economy’

...That moment contributed to her growing realization that the digital economy – about which she had once had so much hope – had a hidden side, something she would come to call “surveillance capitalism.”

Although Facebook is currently at the center of a backlash against its sale of users’ personal data, the trend is much larger than that. It involves Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a growing number of firms with nondigital roots, who are building tools to track and analyze how people act and where they go in the physical world as well as online.

The reason? If they can predict what consumers will do – what they’ll buy, where they’ll travel, even how they’ll vote – their data becomes extremely valuable.