Traditionally, monopolies on goods and services disfigure markets by unfairly eliminating competition in order to raise prices at will. Under surveillance capitalism, however, many of the practices defined as monopolistic actually function as means of cornering user-derived raw-material supplies. There is no monetary price for the user to pay, only an opportunity for the company to extract data. Cornering practices are not designed to protect product niches but rather to protect critical supply routes for the unregulated commodity that is behavioral surplus. In another time, rogue market actors might corner markets in copper or magnesium, but in our time it is behavioral surplus. The corporation unfairly impedes competitors in Search in order to protect the dominance of its most important supply route, not primarily to fix prices.
These cornering operations are not abstractions, with distant effects on minerals or crops that eventually wind their way toward the price of goods. In this picture it is we who are “cornered.” We are the source of the coveted commodity; our experience is the target of extraction. As surveillance capitalism migrates from Silicon Valley to a range of other firms and sectors, we gradually find ourselves in a world of no escape, “cornered” by converging, overlapping, and relentlessly expanding dispossession operations. It is important to say—and we will revisit this theme more than once—that regulatory interventions designed to constrain Google’s monopoly practices are likely to have little effect on the fundamental operations of this market form. New supply routes are continuously discovered, opened, and secured. Dispossession activities are compelled to circumvent every obstacle and will continue to do so, short of a genuine existential threat.
Google’s Android mobile platform offers an example of the governing role of surplus capture and defense. Internet use went mobile with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet, and Google was forced to find new ways to defend and expand its primary supply chain in Search. Android quickly became the corporation’s second critical supply route for behavioral surplus. In 2008 Google led an alliance of technology manufacturers and wireless operators to develop an “open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” Some observers thought that an Android phone was Google’s opportunity to compete with Apple for the lucrative margins on smartphones, but Google insiders had grasped the even greater potential for growth and profit through behavioral surplus and its fabrication into prediction products.
Google licensed Android to mobile handset makers for free because it was intended to draw users into Google Search and other Google services, establishing a ubiquitous mobile supply apparatus to sustain known terrains of behavioral surplus and open up new ones, including geolocation and mobile payment systems that are highly coveted by advertisers.6 As Google’s chief financial officer told financial analysts in 2009, “If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches [that will produce].”7 A prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist described Android devices in 2011 as
not “products” in the classic business sense… they are not trying to make a profit on Android.… They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free).… In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it.8
Supply operations were the protected treasure within the fortified castle, and Android’s development policies were key to the success of this supply strategy. Unlike the iPhone, the Android platform was “open source,” which made it easy for applications developers around the world to create apps for Android users. Eventually, Google bundled this valuable new universe of apps into its Google Play store. Manufacturers who wanted to preinstall Google Play on their devices were required to license and install Google’s mobile services as exclusive or default capabilities: Search, Gmail, Google Pay, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, and whatever other supply routes happen to be in ascendance at the time.
In 2016 Google’s Android practices became the focus of a European Union antitrust investigation, and its complaints were a mirror image of Google’s purposeful construction and protection of vital supply routes in Search and Mobile. Once again, governmental opposition to Google’s monopolistic activities emphasized traditional competitive harms at the expense of surveillance capitalism’s new harms. By April of 2013, Eric Schmidt told a conference devoted to “all things” digital that “our goal with Android is to reach everyone. We’ll cross one billion Android devices in six to nine months. In a year or two, we’ll hit two billion.… A relatively inexpensive smartphone with a browser is all you need to get the world’s information.” That final sentence presumably was intended to describe benefits to Android’s users. However, it is an even-more-effective summary of Google’s own ambitions and an insight into the vital economies of scale associated with this mobile supply route.9
Google fiercely defends threatened supply routes. Any disruption of its extraction operations and its exclusive claims to raw material is the line that cannot be breached. In 2009 Android manufacturer Motorola chose to replace Google’s free location services with those of Skyhook Wireless, which, Motorola believed, produced more-reliable results. A Google product manager admitted Skyhook’s superiority but expressed his concerns in an e-mail to a Google executive, noting that if other manufacturers switched to Skyhook, it “would be awful for Google, because it will cut off our ability to continue collecting data” for the company’s Wi-Fi location database. Court documents from Skyhook’s eventual lawsuit against Motorola (and Samsung) include an e-mail from Google’s senior vice president of Mobile to Motorola’s CEO, insisting that the interruption of Google’s data collection was a “stop-ship issue.”10
Another legal fracas further illustrates how products such as Android are valued more for supply than for sales. Disconnect, Inc., founded in 2011 by two former Google engineers and a privacy-rights attorney, developed desktop and mobile applications “to protect the privacy and security of internet users by blocking invisible, unsolicited network connections between a user’s browser or mobile device and sites/services that engage in invisible tracking or are known or suspected distributors of malware… not only when he browses the web, but also when he uses other third-party mobile applications.”11 Disconnect specifically took aim at the “invisible, unsolicited and frequently undisclosed” network connections from third-party sites and services that occur as soon as you visit a website or open a mobile application.
Unfortunately for Disconnect, the very process that it aimed to impede had been established as a significant supply route for Google and other surveillance capitalists.12 Several studies explain the extent of Google’s extraction architecture, including the Web Privacy Census, which primarily measured cookies. The census analyzed the top 100, 1,000, and 25,000 websites in 2011, 2012, and 2015, years of feverish discovery and elaboration for surveillance capitalists. The comparisons between 2012 and 2015 revealed more than twice as many sites with 100 or more cookies and more than three times the number of sites with 150 or more cookies. In 2015 the team found that anyone who simply visited the 100 most popular websites would collect over 6,000 cookies in his or her computer, 83 percent of which were from third parties unrelated to the website that was visited. The census found “Google tracking infrastructure” on 92 of the top 100 sites and 923 of the top 1,000 sites, concluding that “Google’s ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled, and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet Service Provider can achieve.”13
Another 2015 analysis, this one of the top one million websites, by Timothy Libert of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 90 percent leak data to an average of nine external domains that track, capture, and expropriate user data for commercial purposes. Among these websites, 78 percent initiate third-party transfers to a domain owned by one company: Google. Another 34 percent transfer to a Facebook-owned domain.14
Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan from Princeton University reported in 2016 on the results of their measurement and analysis of tracking data from one million websites.15 They identified 81,000 third parties, but only 123 of those are present on more than 1 percent of sites. Of that group, the top five third parties and twelve of the top twenty are Google-owned domains. “In fact,” they conclude, “Google, Facebook, and Twitter are the only third-party entities present on more than 10% of sites.” Chinese researchers investigated 10,000 apps from the top third-party app markets in 2017. They found a “covert” process in which an app autonomously launches other apps in the background of your phone, and they concluded that this “app collusion” was most prevalent in third-party Android markets. Of the 1,000 top apps on one of China’s popular platforms, 822 launched an average of 76 other apps, and of these launches, 77 percent were triggered by cloud-based “push services” that are intended to update apps but are obviously doing a lot more. In the Android environment, the researchers note, Google provides the push service.16
Finally, extraordinary research from the French nonprofit Exodus Privacy and the Yale Privacy Lab in 2017 documented the exponential proliferation of tracking software. Exodus identified 44 trackers in more than 300 apps for Google’s Android platform, some of which are also produced for Apple’s operating system. Altogether, these apps have been downloaded billions of times. Two themes stand out in the research report: ubiquity and intensification. First, there is hardly an innocent app; if it’s not tracking you now, it may be doing so in the next week or month: “There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as ‘clean’ today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future.” Second is that even the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioral surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting. For example, the ad tracker FidZup developed “communication between a sonic emitter and a mobile phone.…” It can detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners by diffusing a tone, inaudible to the human ear, inside a building: “Users installing ‘Bottin Gourmand,’ a guide to restaurants and hotels in France, would thus have their physical location tracked via retail outlet speakers as they move around Paris. Their experience would be shared by readers of a car magazine app ‘Auto Journal’ and the TV guide app ‘TeleStar.’” In a pattern foreshadowed by the Google patent that we examined in Chapter 3 and that we shall see repeatedly in the coming chapters, the research findings emphasize that the always-on tracking is impervious to the Android “permissions system,” despite its promises of user control.17
Given the hostility and intensity of these supply operations, it is not too surprising that Disconnect software was banned from Google Play’s vast catalog of mobile apps, leading to Disconnect’s lawsuit against Google in 2015. The startup’s complaint explains that “advertising companies including Google use these invisible connections to ‘track’ the user as he/she browses the web or opens other mobile applications, in order to collect personal information about the user, create a ‘profile’ of the user, and make money targeting advertising to the user.”18 It went on to argue that the privacy protections offered by Google “invariably permit the company to continue to gather private information.…”19 Google’s ban of the Disconnect app is exceptionally revealing in light of the fact that, unlike Apple, Google is notoriously “libertarian” when it comes to the millions of apps sold or downloaded for “free” from its app store. Its loose guidelines attempt to identify and exclude malicious applications but little else.20
Disconnect’s founders attempted to challenge the extraction imperative, but they could not do so alone. After trying—without success—to negotiate with Google, they eventually joined other organizations in filing a complaint against Google in the EU, helping to precipitate an Android-focused antitrust probe.21 As Disconnect argued,
Google is under enormous pressure from the financial community to increase the “effectiveness” of its tracking, so that it can increase revenues and profits. Giving a user the ability to control his own privacy information (and to protect himself from malware) by blocking invisible connections to problematic sites constitutes an existential threat to Google.22
As ex-Googlers, the founders of Disconnect thought that they knew their adversary well, but they underestimated the progress of surveillance capitalism’s institutionalization and the ferocity with which the corporation was prepared to fend off “existential threats” to its supply routes.
III. The Dispossession Cycle
Long before Disconnect, Google had discovered that successful dispossession is not a single action but rather an intricate convergence of political, social, administrative, and technical operations that requires cunning management over a substantial period of time. Its dispossession operations reveal a predictable sequence of stages that must be crafted and orchestrated in great detail in order to achieve their ultimate destination as a system of facts through which surplus extraction is normalized.
The four stages of the cycle are incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection. Taken together, these stages constitute a “theory of change” that describes and predicts dispossession as a political and cultural operation supported by an elaborate range of administrative, technical, and material capabilities. There are many vivid examples of this cycle, including Google’s Gmail; Google’s efforts to establish supply routes in social networks, first with Buzz and then with Google+; and the company’s development of Google Glass. In this chapter we focus on the Street View narrative for a close look at the dispossession cycle and its management challenges.
The first stage of successful dispossession is initiated by unilateral incursion into undefended space: your laptop, your phone, a web page, the street where you live, an e-mail to your friend, your walk in the park, browsing online for a birthday gift, sharing photos of your kids, your interests and tastes, your digestion, your tears, your attention, your feelings, your face. The incursion is when dispossession operations rely on their virtual capabilities to kidnap behavioral surplus from the nonmarket spaces of everyday life where it lives. The incursion initiates Google’s most basic and prolific form of dispossession: Arendt’s repeated “original sin of simple robbery.” Incursion moves down the road without looking left or right, continuously laying claim to decision rights over whatever is in its path. “I’m taking this,” it says. “These are mine now.”
The company has learned to launch incursions and proceed until resistance is encountered. It then seduces, ignores, overwhelms, or simply exhausts its adversaries. Seduction means a cascade of golden enticements: unprecedented storage, access to new qualities of information, new conveniences. When necessary, the company can just as easily pivot toward harsher tactics that aim to deplete its adversaries’ time, money, and grit. There are hundreds of cases launched against Google by countries, states, groups, and individuals, and there are many more cases that never become public. According to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), no one knows precisely how many lawsuits there are around the world.23 The legal challenges are varied, but they nearly always come back to the same thing: unilateral incursion met by resistance.
Legal opposition and social protest have surfaced in relation to the digitalization of books,24 the collection of personal information through Street View’s Wi-Fi and camera capabilities,25 the capture of voice communications,26 the bypassing of privacy settings,27 the manipulation of search results,28 the extensive retention of search data,29 the tracking of smartphone location data,30 wearable technologies and facial-recognition capabilities,31 the secret collection of student data for commercial purposes,32 and the consolidation of user profiles across all Google’s services a
nd devices,33 just to name several instances. Expect to see drones, body sensors, neurotransmitters, “digital assistants,” and other sensored devices on this list in the years to come. Meanwhile, Google is consistently stunning in its sense of entitlement, resolve, and audacity. The extraction imperative compels it to push new boundaries into undefended space.
In a second stage the aim is habituation. Whereas lawsuits and investigations unwind at the tedious pace of democratic institutions, Google continues the development of its contested practices at high velocity. During the elapsed time of FTC and FCC inquiries, court cases, judicial reviews, and EU Commission investigations, the new contested practices become more firmly established as institutional facts, rapidly bolstered by growing ecosystems of stakeholders. People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation. The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes more difficult for individuals and groups to complain.
In a third stage of the cycle, when Google is occasionally forced to alter its practices, its executives and engineers produce superficial but tactically effective adaptations that satisfy the immediate demands of government authorities, court rulings, and public opinion. Meanwhile, in a final stage the corporation regroups to cultivate new rhetoric, methods, and design elements that redirect contested supply operations just enough so that they appear to be compliant with social and legal demands. The creativity, financial resources, and determination brought to the task of managing this staged process are flexible and dynamic. In contrast, the operational necessity for economies of scale in the capture of behavioral surplus is a perpetual-motion machine whose implacable rhythms offer no room for divergence.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 17