REAL MEDIA
2018 / ISSUE 108
9
SURVEILLANCE
CAPITALISM: BEV SKEGGS
'First of all, I think allowing pre-
emptive capture objects into
your home is extraordinarily
stupid. They're listening for you,
they're trying to learn everything
about you so they can basically
target you with advertising and
again this is done in the name of
convenience. So that's the object.
But It's the things that we wear
that are really more dangerous.
Because they're picking up our
basic bodily rhythms, and they
are combined with other data
and sold to medical companies
and will be sold to health
insurance companies.
'Now in the US we see that
very explicitly, but in the UK
we will see that in the future.
So will people receive medical
treatment if they are known not
to move during the day? Will
they be forced to do exercise?
There's one council that's already
issuing Fitbits to people and we
want to know how is that used in
the future, if they have to make
cuts in health care or even social
care? If you've had a sedentary
life where you haven't done the
'self care that's necessary for
the responsible individual' what
happens when you age? Will you
get care? I think there's really
significant impacts in these sorts
of objects.'
'Remember the NHS gave
Google a huge amount of data
to experiment with and they
only owned up when they got
caught. They'd probably still
be experimenting with it and
working out who to fund and not
to fund. And we wouldn't know.
That's the thing. If we went and
presented ourselves and were
told an operation is going to take
24 months, we wouldn't know
that was because it says you're a
lazy person who doesn't deserve
an operation. The data is going
to be predicting the deserving
and undeserving population.
And I think that is politically,
very, very scary. Because it's
not even horrifically racist or
dodgy politicians saying you're
undeserving. It's accumulated
data over a lifetime saying you
do not deserve to live.'
Watch the full interview at
realmedia.press
Sociologist Beverley Skeggs completed research
on Facebook's data harvesting and tracking
capability in 2017. We talked to her about
the increasing use of pre-emptive capture
technology such as Alexa, and wearable tech:
