Review: The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power

The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The fact is that we're all involved the seeking information but some have much more power over information than others. Turow shows us the ways in which asymmetrical balances of information increasingly leave the average human much more vulnerable and controllable by large corporations that wheel and deal in data. Turow explores how companies increasingly have used digital technology to create a variety of methods to track, predict, and ultimately influence and control our lives and that while we don't necessarily see the impact of this--that is exactly the point. As companies increasingly follow us and compile direct and indirect data about us, our family, our friends, it makes it increasingly easy for them to make things look normal or manufacture choices feel like authentic choices. The result is that companies can leverage the vastness of its data to determine not just the maximum amount of money and resources (e.g. labor) it can extract out of us at the smallest cost, but also do this increasingly with other companies that are not yet deeply vested in data analytics. While free-market capitalism is already hyper-exploitative, the new data dealers can amplify that in ways that are subtle, hard to track, and dubious at best. And they get to do this while never really have to answer for their actions or sharing their own personal or company data. Turow's work is frustrating and alarming in his illustration of this creeping of data control and manipulation--it is similar and simpler in many ways to Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Overall, it's an enlightening book to read and consider though his early tone can come across as being judgmental of consumers for allowing this to happen.

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