Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and former software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also served as the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth to be US$25.1 billion.
Electronic colonialism or digital colonialism, sometimes abbreviated to eColonialism, was conceived by Herbert Schiller as documented in his 1976 text Communication and Cultural Domination. In this work, Schiller postulated the advent of a kind of technological colonialism, a system that subjugates Third World and impoverished nations to the will of world powers such as the United States, Japan, and Germany, given the necessary "importation of communication equipment and foreign-produced software". As scholarship on this phenomenon has evolved, it has come to describe a scenario in which it has become normal for people to be exploited through data and other forms of technology. It draws parallels to colonialism in the historical sense when territories and resources were appropriated by the wealthy and powerful for profit.
An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American technology giant Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 3 billion monthly active users, and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Shoshana Zuboff is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar.
PublicAffairs is a book publishing company located in New York City and has been a part of the Hachette Book Group since 2016.
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle.
Dataveillance is the practice of monitoring and collecting online data as well as metadata. The word is a portmanteau of data and surveillance. Dataveillance is concerned with the continuous monitoring of users' communications and actions across various platforms. For instance, dataveillance refers to the monitoring of data resulting from credit card transactions, GPS coordinates, emails, social networks, etc. Using digital media often leaves traces of data and creates a digital footprint of our activity. Unlike sousveillance, this type of surveillance is not often known and happens discreetly. Dataveillance may involve the surveillance of groups of individuals. There exist three types of dataveillance: personal dataveillance, mass dataveillance, and facilitative mechanisms.
The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce, electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.
Cross-device tracking refers to technology that enables the tracking of users across multiple devices such as smartphones, television sets, smart TVs, and personal computers.
Data exhaust or exhaust data is the trail of data left by the activities of an Internet or other computer system users during their online activity, behavior, and transactions. This is part of a broader category of unconventional data that includes geospatial, network, and time-series data and may be useful for predictive analytics. Every visited website, clicked link, and even hovering with a mouse is collected, leaving behind a trail of data. An enormous amount of often raw data are created, which can be in the form of cookies, temporary files, logfiles, storable choices, and more. This information can help to improve the online experience, for example through customized content. It can be used to improve tracking trends and studying data exhaust also improves the user interface and the layout design. On the other hand, they can also compromise privacy, as they offer a valuable insight into the user's habits. For example, as the world's most popular website, Google, uses this data exhaust to refine the predictive value of their products.
Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, though the two can reinforce each other. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.
Data politics encompasses the political aspects of data including topics ranging from data activism, open data and open government. The ways in which data is collected, accessed, and what we do with that data has changed in contemporary society due to a number of factors surrounding issues of politics. An issue that arises from political data is often how disconnected people are from their own data, rarely gaining access to the data they produce. Large platforms like Google have a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" stance on data collection to which the greater population is largely ignorant, leading to movements within data activism.
The platform economy is economic and social activity facilitated by platforms. Such platforms are typically online sales or technology frameworks. By far the most common type are "transaction platforms", also known as "digital matchmakers". Examples of transaction platforms include Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, and Baidu. A second type is the "innovation platform", which provides a common technology framework upon which others can build, such as the many independent developers who work on Microsoft's platform.
Big Tech, also known as the Tech Giants, refers to the most dominant information technology companies. The term most often refers to American technology companies, notably the five largest: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. These companies are also known as the Big Five, or excluding Microsoft, the Big Four. Globally, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi (BATX) are the Chinese equivalent of the Big Five. Big Tech can also include smaller tech companies with high valuations, such as Netflix, or non-tech companies with high-tech practices, such as the automaker Tesla.
AppSheet is an application that provides a no-code development platform for application software, which allows users to create mobile, tablet, and web applications using data sources like Google Drive, DropBox, Office 365, and other cloud-based spreadsheet and database platforms. The platform can be utilized for a broad set of business use cases including project management, customer relationship management, field inspections, and personalized reporting.
Platform capitalism refers to the activities of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other actors to conduct their own business.
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis about the negative social effects of social media.
A digital platform is a software-based online infrastructure that facilitates interactions and transactions between users.
Benedetta Brevini is an Italian academic, author, journalist, and media and technology reformer. Brevini is currently an Associate professor of political economy of communication at The University of Sydney and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
