Commercial surveillance is vast as the push is to get more information about consumers and use it to shape their purchasing activity. It happens in person in stores with CCTV and sensor networks. It also happens with digital tools and services via cookies, and beacons from advertising networks in web content (Figure 11.1).

Relationship to Other Domains

Commercial surveillance happens in the context of individuals interacting with commercial entities in person or online. Individuals, when they are being surveilled, don't see the surveillance and think of themselves as being me and my identity. Therefore, commercial transactions are likely to be occurring in parallel with commercial surveillance. Data from commercial surveillance are sold to data brokers and are vulnerable to leaks and hacks and could end up on the illicit market.

What Is Surveillance in the Context of Commercial Enterprises?

This was touched on in the domain of government surveillance, but it is worth revisiting with an eye to what it means in the specific context of commercial surveillance. Lyon defines surveillance as “any collection and processing of data whether personally identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing those whose data have been garnered.” Commercial entities are trying to observe and record personal details to manage their customers and influence potential customers.

Corporate marketing and media systems emerged out of World War II to entice people to buy things to absorb the surplus production of the economy. “Marketing evolved quickly in its period of greatest advance in the 1950s into highly organized system of customer surveillance, targeting propaganda and psychological manipulation of populations.”

The metaphors of Big Brother and the type of totalitarian government intrusion into people's lives that it would create are contrasted with the corporate surveillance as “merely interested in providing goods and services.” It goes deeper with surveillance-based reality television, which equates submission to comprehensive surveillance with self-expression and self-knowledge. Andrejevic's research shows that people's exposure to television increases their acceptance of ideas such as “the more businesses know about me the better they can meet my individual needs.”