Previously, data was only used to improve the quality of search results, but anything beyond the data needed for these improvements constituted a “surplus”, which signalled to Google how people were behaving. It was only in the heat of emergency they discovered these digital traces, which they had thought were worthless, were actually full of rich predictive signals,” Zuboff tells Computer Weekly. “The data was considered just waste material. Shoshana Zuboff, author of The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, argues it was only when the bubble burst and pressure from investors began to mount that Google discovered its servers were full of behaviourally rich data. Initially, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin vehemently opposed the idea of advertising funded search engines, which they condemned as “ inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers”. One such enterprise was Google, which was incorporated just two years before, and where revenues at the time primarily depended on licensing deals for web services.
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