The author defines datatization as “the act of a person or entity monetizing data, mainly personal, with the aim of benefiting from it for their own interest or that of a third party”.
In her hundred-page book, she exhaustively identifies and lists the risks we take on a daily basis, by using and overusing technology. More than ever in terms of online applications, the marketing principle “if the product is free, you are the product” applies to the economic models of large, and smaller, online software publishing companies. The combination of big data, artificial intelligence, statistics and the natural exhibitionism of humans has created a new world, in which everyone produces data, without monetizing it directly. But where companies collect this data, in exchange for a free service, and seek to monetize it, to digitalize it, explains the author.
But it's a bit easy. Everything that the author rightly criticizes in the practices of technology suppliers is ultimately only the transposition of human behavior into the digital world. When we criticize the incomprehensible general conditions of service or application publishers, are there so many differences with the general conditions for opening an account in a bank that your banker makes you sign, asking you making it clear that there is no point in reading them. When you take out an insurance contract, a mutual health insurance contract, do you read the many pages of fine print in the contract and its annexes? And this does not date from the emergence of technology!
When the author criticizes the simplicity of subscribing to Amazon Prime and the complexity of unsubscribing, is this not a customer retention technique, well known to marketing professionals, and which we already had? much criticized in the non-digital world of mobile operators in the 90s?
As for saying good things about your product, even if it conceals less avowed inclinations, is that simply not called advertising? 3000 BC AD in Egypt, 1477 in England, or in 1660 in The London Gazette… not everyone dates the first advertisement in the same way. But when doctors promoted cigarettes and their benefits (1) in the 60s and 70s, it was advertising, and there was no digital technology!
An interesting book to read to have a summary of the bad practices of software and platform publishers. But a book that leaves us wanting more. Out of a hundred pages, only a few lines are devoted to the search for solutions. We would have liked the author to make concrete proposals. Should we regulate? Locally, globally, and in what way? Should we censor and ban certain applications, certain practices, and how to implement this censorship? Should we educate, at school through teachers, at home through parents? Should we create a mandatory economic model that would allow everyone to record the use made of their data, to receive a portion of it? How to implement it? What economic model accepted by the customer could we replace data processing?
Besides, is it digital that we should criticize or humans, who develop it, just like those who use it? A book to read without a doubt to understand the problem, but we hope that the author prepares a second work for us focused on possible solutions.
ISBN : 978-2336494203
Lien : https://www.editions-harmattan.fr/catalogue/livre/la-donnetisation/77353
