Hollowed-out privacy, digital platforms and surveillance capitalism: The limits of a market-oriented approach to data

This chapter takes the compounded issue of privacy and surveillance emerging from the rise of digital platforms and looks at the spectrum of possible regulatory responses. It offers a critical essay that brings the themes of privacy, digital platforms and surveillance capitalism to bear on the question whether a neoliberal approach relying on market dynamics is able to resolve some of these shortcomings. The chapter uses the specific example of the 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) of the Australian Government, to illustrate its argument. The analysis of the report finds that the way the ACCC has reconstituted privacy as a market commodity contributes to hollowing-out privacy by legitimising surveillance capitalism and its implicit encroachment on people’s true rights to privacy