‘Surveillance Capitalism’ author sees data privacy awakening
For the first time since 2007, Shoshana Zuboff is feeling optimistic. Zuboff, an emerita Harvard Business School professor and internet privacy advocate, said the outpouring of concern she’s seen at stop after stop on what has been a 14-month speaking tour for her latest book has given her hope that people are finally waking up to the dangers of freely sharing their data with tech companies like Facebook and Google. Zuboff said that 2007 was a watershed year when digitization of the world’s information was largely complete, having climbed from 1 percent of global information in 1986 — including words, cultural assets, laws, languages — to 25 percent in 2000 to 97 percent in 2007. Today, she said, virtually all of the world’s information is in digital format. “I feel like my entire adult life has been spent in observation of this epistemic trauma,” Zuboff said. “It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.” What...