When discussing the effect social networking has had on surveillance culture, it is key to look at the effect the rise of social media has had on economic surveillance. It is common knowledge that most social media sites gain the vast majority of their income through advertising. However, often we find products that we have viewed on other websites advertised at the side of our Facebook pages or twitter feeds. Fuchs uses Google and Facebook as an example of economic surveillance within social media. “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, you maybe should...
When discussing the effect social networking has had on surveillance culture, it is key to look at the effect the rise of social media has had on economic surveillance. It is common knowledge that most social media sites gain the vast majority of their income through advertising. However, often we find products that we have viewed on other websites advertised at the side of our Facebook pages or twitter feeds. Fuchs uses Google and Facebook as an example of economic surveillance within social media. “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, you maybe should not be doing it in the first place”, this quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt helps to understand that the owners of these social media platforms do not value privacy with the highest regards. We can assume from this statement that Schmitt believes that all information uploaded to the internet should be publically available and corporations should be able to use this information for economic gain. We see this through googles attempt at creating a social media site: Google Buzz, which linked directly to g-mail. Google is one of the main companies when it comes to being a platform for online advertising, so it is fair to assume that it considers Facebook and Twitters its competitors in this field. Its users, as well as civil rights activists, heavily criticised buzz as it threatens the privacy of users due to its link with g-mail as contacts that users may want to keep private were made public. Google’s economic strategy involves gathering data from users using the various Google applications that they use. The more Google applications that they use, the more precise user data they have that is sold on to advertising clients who target users using specifically targeted advertising.
