Zuboff, who published her first book in 1989 on the future of technology and data in the workplace, warns in Surveillance Capitalism of a “seventh extinction” that threatens to eradicate “what has been held most precious in human nature.” Given the fragility of the global political and economic order, surveillance capitalism amounts to a “coup from above,” Zuboff argues, an assault on democracy by way of subverting the very idea of what it means to be an individual. Cataloguing a dizzying array of sensors and invasive software, Zuboff sketches a vision of the economic future in which companies race to collect data in pursuit of Facebook- or Google-like profits.
First published as an essay in a German publication in 2014, what Zuboff describes amounts to a new economic logic hatched in corporate America that aims to extract staggering value from users’ private lives. This episode is a perfect encapsulation of the digital threat outlined in a new book by tech critic and Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Google claims the microphone “was never intended to be a secret” and “has never been turned on,” but it’s hard to shake the feeling that hidden mics are a natural step for Silicon Valley giants intent on collecting as much data as possible, no matter the cost to user privacy. There was a catch, however: No one knew that the Nest Secure actually had a microphone inside it.
On February 4, Google proudly announced that its Nest Secure home anti-intrusion device would now support its voice-activated Google Assistant service.
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