CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societyaims. But these options are so hidden that one can expect that only few people will findthem and deactivate them. studiVZ is the only of the three platforms that does not sharedata with third parties and that allows to opt out of advertising emails. All threeplatforms pass data on to the police if it is necessary for law enforcement. In some ofthe privacy policies, the myth that surveillance guarantees security is reinforced. So forexample studiVZ speaks of the need of surveillance in order to guarantee “prevention ofdangers for state and public security and (…) the prosecution of criminal offences”.MySpace wants to “protect the safety and security of Users of the MySpace Services ormembers of the public including acting in urgent circumstances” with the help ofsurveillance.Overall, this overview shows that commercial social networking platforms have aneconomic interest in collecting, assessing, and selling data and share the politicalattitude of surveillance for public security. Targeted personalized advertising is astandard feature of all three platforms. It is no accident that this is not an opt-in solutionbecause if this were the case, less user behaviour data could be collected and sold toadvertising clients, which would have negative influences on profits. Therefore we canconclude that corporate ISNS have a profit interest in economic surveillance. They arealso willing to share the myth of surveillance as security, which is realized in privacypolicies that state that personal data might be given to government authorities. In theage of post-9/11, nation states are eager to collect data on citizens because they thinkthis is a way to prevent potential terrorism. Therefore such privacy policies by ISNS notonly advance the security myth, but also support the rise of a surveillance society, inwhich all citizens are considered as potential criminals and terrorists and fundamentalfreedoms are limited. We can conclude that from a critical perspective the mostimportant feature of ISNS considered at the level of society as totality is not that theyenable communication and networking, which are only interpersonal, but not societalfeatures, but that they are online platforms that enforce economic and politicalsurveillance and ideological myths of a secure society that is achieved by advancingsurveillance.44