ABSTRACT
Internet users have grown increasingly conscious of the fact that they are subject to ubiquitous monitoring and data gathering by marketers and other commercial entities. A recent study by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that 84 percent of Internet users surveyed “strongly or somewhat agreed that they want to have more control over what marketers could learn about them,” while 65 percent “agreed that they had come to accept that they had little control over it” (Turow, Hennessy, and Draper 2015, 14). As users express suspicion and resignation in regards to mass consumer monitoring, media researchers have been probing the implications and signicance of this monitoring through perspectives that focus on it as both a form of social control (e.g., Gandy 1993; Andrejevic 2007) and a method of exploiting valuable information generated largely by unpaid labor (Cohen 2008). Web protocols and the structures of major media and social media sites are designed to fulll marketers’ and advertisers’ prerogatives as they seek to capture more information about our online activities (Turow 2012). Simultaneously, more and more devices and procedures are allowing marketers to monitor our activity in ostensibly “ofine” spaces through GPS tracking, a new wave of sensor technologies, shoppers’ cards, and many other forms of inputs (Turow, McGuigan, and Maris 2015).
