And Stay Away

"Surveillance capitalism," as defined in Wikipedia, "is an economic system centered around the capture and commodification of personal data for the core purpose of profit-making." Or, pretty much exactly what you would expect from businesses that find themselves awash in personally identifiable information (known as "PII" in privacy circles) that can be used to help them to understand which of the tens or hundreds of millions of people in their markets may be prospective customers.

In any event, I was recently reading an article on one woman's attempt to escape the notice of the capitalists whom, if they found out that she was pregnant, would deluge her with advertisements for all of the things that she might need to purchase before, during and after the delivery. She, however, cognizant that there was a high risk that the baby might not survive long enough to be delivered, wanted to prevent the onslaught of solicitations. She eventually failed in this, and at about the same time she lost the pregnancy, the surveillance system, not being well-tuned enough to know better, tipped off its clients, and members of the baby-industrial complex, each hoping to be the recipients of her purchasing, swung into action. And since the surveillance system wasn't set up to understand that the attention was unwanted, the advertisements kept coming.

The article was a call for greater government oversight of how companies use personal information and make it difficult for people to avoid sharing it. And I, as a Certified Information Privacy Professional, get it. People's computing devices, whether those are dedicated computing devices or cellular phones, are designed to leak massive amounts of information about their owners and their habits. Cellular phones are the worst offenders, as even in households with a number of people, they tend to have single users, and companies that have finagled their way into being allowed to track the device's location can pretty much always tell precisely who that single user is.

But what prompted me to remember this piece was the author's contention that business finding out that she had been pregnant, and, not realizing that it was in the past tense, marketing to her was more than a simple invasion of privacy. [And here, I'm going to take a moment to define a term. "Privacy," in this context, refers to the ability to control when, how and under what circumstances a person reveals information about themselves to others. What makes the practice of "surveillance capitalism" a problem in this regard is that businesses are sifting through information that was not meant for them, often by granting themselves expansive rights to any information they can find about a person, and then treating that information as property of theirs.] She described the experience as one of "emotional harm."

It is, perhaps, a flaw in our legal system that many rules and regulations operate under a philosophy of "no harm, no foul." Because it prompts people to see the discomforts caused by the actions of others as harmful, in order to give themselves a cause for action. It shouldn't need to be that way. But the problem with capitalism, especially as it's practiced in the United States, isn't that it's necessarily rapacious. Oftentimes, it's simply needy. While diapers, for instance, are more or less a must-have for new parents, they're not exactly difficult to source. Any number of companies make them, and each of them is desperate to add whatever they can to the bottom line, under the watchful eyes of investors and stock markets. Companies compete to be top-of-mind for potential customers, and in a society that tends to deny that there is any such thing as bad publicity, the risk of a negative reaction may often be seen as worthwhile.

There is a strong case to be made that people shouldn't have to claim the emotional harm of being reminded that they've lost a pregnancy to be able to say: "Hey, knock it off." Of course, companies want to make it difficult. A term that I remember being bandied around during the debate over the "Do Not Call" list was "external willpower." Companies, believing that they can influence people, if only they have access to them, bristle at suggestions that they should be blocked from that access. There is, however, something to be said for "Don't call me, I'll call you," whether or not businesses want to hear it.