Milestone 5: The Surveillance Economy

Requirements

For this milestone, your team will report on the surveillance economy, which was originally called surveillance capitalism by Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff. In this report, your team will explore how privacy regulations affect the surveillance economy and ways that companies can work around existing regulations to monetize personal data. Your team will conduct research into the surveillance economy and report on the following topics:

  1. Define and explain the surveillance economy/surveillance capitalism.
  2. Give some examples of companies, products, and/or services that participate in the surveillance economy, including what kinds of information they collect and sell.
  3. Explain how companies can skirt privacy regulations, where they exist.
  4. Address the ethics of corporate surveillance.

To cover this material, begin from the Starting Points section found below. Use Internet and CCU Library search tools to locate additional sources. You MAY use Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, but you MUST verify the results they provide. Remember that AI tools can and do hallucinate completely incorrect information, and they are programmed to sound extremely confident despite being totally wrong.

Submission

Once the report is complete, the Team Leader should export it into PDF format and upload it as the submission for this milestone. Only the Team Leader needs to submit the final report, although another team member can submit in the event of an emergency involving the Team Leader. That said, everyone in the team should read the final report and double-check that their individual contributions are listed correctly at the end. Also, each team member should verify that the Team Leader has uploaded the final PDF before the assignment closing date in Moodle.

Starting Points

The starting point for research into the surveillance economy is to read Shoshana Zuboff’s article Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization in the Journal of Information Technology (30), 2015. In this scholarly article, she explains some methods companies use to collect data about people and how they can profit from that data. She also states that companies that know so much about individual people can effectively form a shadow government that she calls a "Big Other," referring to Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel 1984.

I have numerous examples of issues related to the surveillance economy in my undergraduate-level Anti-Forensics and Digital Privacy course materials. You may cite any of the specific articles in this course OER, and you can also follow my citations out to locate other sources.

Submission

Once the report is complete, the Team Leader should export it into PDF format and upload it as the submission for this milestone. Only the Team Leader needs to submit the final report, although another team member can submit in the event of an emergency involving the Team Leader. That said, everyone in the team should read the final report and double-check that their individual contributions are listed correctly at the end. Also, each team member should verify that the Team Leader has uploaded the final PDF before the assignment closing date in Moodle.

ABET Assessment

This activity supports the following ABET program SLOs: