[ICTs-and-Society] Blogpost about Google’s “New“ Terms of Use and Privacy Policy: Old Exploitation and User Commodification in a New Ideological Skin

[Christian Fuchs]

Dear James,

Thank you for the thoughtfull discussion about Google.

I agree that the question is what the limit of the use of personal 
information for advertising should be. I think I have a somewhat 
different answer than you have.

For me the question is what the role and effects of advertising culture 
are in society.

I am not at all arguing for opt-out advertising, but rather for a 
worldwide legal provision that makes opt-in advertising mandatory and 
outlaws opt-out. I agree with Oscar Gandy that personalised ads are a 
form of panoptic sorting and of social discrimination.

The problem is not data processing as such, the problem are the class 
relations into which Google services (and other corporate Internet 
services) are embedded.

Google's unification of terms simplifies and joins up the economic 
surveillance of users, as you say. From Google's business interests, 
this is a logical step because it promises more profits. At the same 
time, Google wants to ideologically sell this step as bringing about 
more user privacy, control etc, which it does not.

I do think that advertising culture, the existence of advertising, is 
problematic and that it is the outgrowth of the commodification and 
commercialization of the world. We were better off with a world without 
advertising. I think for Critical Internet Studies, we also need (among 
a lot of things) Critical Advertising and Consumer Culture Studies.

In the case of advertising-based audience commodification (as with 
Google), advertising is not only a privacy-violation, but - and this is 
my crucial point - it is the exploitation of user labour.

I have problems with self-regulatory data protection, where companies 
choose whatever they want to do with user data and one tells users: oh, 
here are some great ways of how you can reduce the amount of data we use 
about you (opt-outs, privacy settings where the standard option is 
always the high use of user data for advertising, privacy-enhancing 
technologies, etc). THe thing is that for consumer privacy protection, 
it should not be required for the user/consumer to take action for not 
having ones data processed for advertising purposes, companies should in 
the first place not use data for such purposes and should be obliged to 
in the first place use no advertising. If a user wants his/her data to 
be used for advertising, then s/he should have the possibility to enable 
it, but the standard should be "no advertising". These are questions of 
choice, power, action, negative and positive freedom.

I would not argue for keeping the user data of different Google services 
separate and not joining them up for advertising. I think this is too 
short-sighted. It is like not working in one factory and being exploited 
there for 8 hours and monitored by workplace CCTV, but working in 4 
different factories 2 hours a day, being monitored by workplace CCTV, 
but not allowing the factories to compare the recorded data. I am in 
favour of not letting them exchange the data, but much more I think that 
the problem is that the workers is forced/has to work in these factories 
in order to survive. So what I am questioning is factory life as 
exploited life as such and that we should limit the commodification of 
everything, which requires legally limiting targeted advertising 
possibilities.

And the Internet is a factory of surplus-value generation, Google being 
one of the primary Internet factories, in which we all work and create 
economic value. And in this factory, advertising culture has become a 
productive space, depends on a high-level of total instantenous 
real-time economic surveilallance of online activities and the 
transformation of all (or a lot of) online time into labour time. But 
being productive in the corporate Internet factory means being exploited.

There is a difference between work and labour, the latter is 
value-generating and exploited. We work on Wikipedia and Diaspora, we 
labour on Google and Facebook. What I am questioning is the existence of 
the Internet factory, the labour it requires and the total 
commodification of online activities. Advertising is at the heart of the 
problem.

Best, Christian