Here’s a piece I’ve been working on this month. I welcome any feedback:
e class="onebox allowlistedgeneric" data-onebox-src="https://theprivacydad.com/what-is-behavioural-surplus/">
Behavioural surplus is the extra information that can be processed when we interact with an app, website or device, in order to be repackaged and sold as accurate predictions about us.
I highly recommend reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, though it is slow-going for me. I read 5-10 pages a day and annotate a lot!
6 Likes
That book is so long. It took me 2 months of constant reading to get through all of it. It’s stupendously researched and explained and what’s said and explained is still shocking to me.
Yes, I do highly recommend that book but I wish I had gotten the audiobook instead. It’s easier to digest long books that way, albeit you can’t annotate.
–
Reading your blog post:
Isn’t behavioral surplus nothing but metadata then? But well written. People need to know about all of it. As impressive as the book is, I think there needs to be a “dumbed down” version of it to make it even more palatable to even more people. I hate to say it like that but it’s kinda true I feel. Not everyone is going to understand or understand the importance of all that’s explained all the time.
But anyone can disagree with me, that’s just how I feel about it having read it all a couple of years ago and being informed of how things have gone and are going today.
3 Likes
Yes, I was thinking about metadata a lot while writing, but I like the phrase behavioural surplus because it explains itself better than metadata does.
I totally agree with you that the idea needs to become more mainstream, but not sure how that can be done.
2 Likes
Education. Tech literacy. And tech literacy as a part of formal education starting in middle school. Raising awareness.
Every problem has a solution. The question is always effectiveness and feasibility as long as non secular elements don’t complicate things.
