The root of the trouble, she said, is that instead of viewing that shared information as a public good - to be used to improve individual lives and society - it has been used to gain money and power. What alarms Zuboff so much is not the digitization of information per se but rather the claims of ownership that major internet companies have put on the data, including that from millions of consumers, and its subsequent use. “It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.” “I feel like my entire adult life has been spent in observation of this epistemic trauma,” Zuboff said. Today, she said, virtually all of the world’s information is in digital format. Zuboff said that 2007 was a watershed year when digitization of the world’s information was largely complete, having climbed from 1 percent of global information in 1986 - including words, cultural assets, laws, languages - to 25 percent in 2000 to 97 percent in 2007. Zuboff, an emerita Harvard Business School professor and internet privacy advocate, said the outpouring of concern she’s seen at stop after stop on what has been a 14-month speaking tour for her latest book has given her hope that people are finally waking up to the dangers of freely sharing their data with tech companies like Facebook and Google. For the first time since 2007, Shoshana Zuboff is feeling optimistic.
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