Is the end of surveillance capitalism on the horizon? The commodification of users’ personal data has underpinned the revenue streams of tech companies for years. Personalized ads — which leverage detailed information about digital behaviors, such as what Instagram videos users stop scrolling to see or what links they click on Facebook — have earned Meta alone USD 118 bn in revenue in 2021, according to theNew York Times. This digital culture ofsurveillance capitalism — a term coined by American author and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff in 2014 — has long raised ethical concerns about infringing upon privacy, democracy, and autonomy. But recent changes in legislation and advertising practices in some jurisdictions suggest a partial shift away from the non-consensual use of personal data.

The winds of change are blowing hard Meta’s way: On 4 January, EU regulators fined MetaUSD 414 mn for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ruling that the tech giant had illegally forced users to accept personalized ads by bundling them with lengthy terms of service. The judgment, which demanded that Meta remodel its advertising approach, jeopardizes 5-7% of the company’s overall advertising revenue. “It is the beginning of the end of the data freeforall,” privacy activist Johnny Ryan toldWired.

Apple is spinning its own storm: In 2021, the company rolled out a new feature that explicitly asks iPhone users if they want their data to be tracked by mobile applications for personalized ads. The new policy impinged on the revenues of firms that rely on user data for advertising, most notably Meta, which in February 2022 said in its earnings call (pdf) that Apple’s move could have a “significant headwind” of around USD 10 bn to its business.

And Google is baking a new cookie strategy: The tech giant intends to beginphasing out Chrome’s third-party cookies in 2H 2024 as part of its widerPrivacy Sandbox initiative, which seeks to create standards for websites to track user data without compromising privacy. Third-party cookies, like their more benign first-party counterparts, are small packets of information that websites store on a user’s computer by tracking their browsing activity. But while first-party cookies help streamline the user experience by remembering useful data such as log-in credentials, language preferences, or shopping cart items, third-party cookies are predominantly created by advertisers (the third party) to deliver targeted ads. Google’s endeavor follows moves by Safari, Firefox, and Brave, all of which have been blocking third-party cookies for years.

Not so fast, Google: The firm’s cookie-killing plan involves a replacement namedTopics, a new system that analyzes browsing history to share topics that interest the user, such as fitness or travel, with websites and their advertising partners. The system purportedly gives the user more privacy and control by concealing the specific websites they’ve visited and enabling them to remove assigned topics or disable the feature entirely. However, Topics doesn’t completely rule out the risk of websites uncovering personal data. “It is still possible that websites calling the API may combine or correlate topics with other signals to infer sensitive information, outside of intended use,” Google says.

Surveillance capitalism is more rampant than it seems. “This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to … virtually every economic sector, from ins. to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as ‘smart’ and every service described as ‘personalized,’” Zuboff told theHarvard Gazette. For instance, CPAP machines — breathing devices that assist patients with sleep disorders — send usage data to health insurers, whichdeny insurance payments to patients who don’t use the machine. Giant US retailer Target, meanwhile, has figured out how toanalyze historical buying data to find out when a woman is pregnant in order to sell baby merchandise.

The future remains uncertain. While some advocate for an opt-in economy that lets users choose who their data is shared with, others endorse tracker-free contextual advertising that displays ads where they are likely to be of interest, such as a VW ad embedded in an article about cars, Wired writes. The EU ruling against Meta and progress by tech companies in soliciting user consent are significant milestones that may help rein in surveillance capitalism, “[b]ut with personalized ads being proposed as part of an alternative system, what comes next might not look that different,” says Wired.

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