Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ and Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, is calling on lawmakers to criminalize Big Tech’s “secret extraction of behavioral data from our lives” and put their immunity from “crackpot” versions of free speech that flourish on online platforms firmly in the crosshairs, as governments around the world turn their attention to crafting new rules of the road to rein in technology giants.

“There is no such thing as cyberspace, there is no world that is somehow exempt from the charter of rights and laws that we live by in our societies,” Dr. Zuboff told ORF America’s Nikhila Natarajan, days after Facebook’s self appointed ‘Supreme Court’ punted its decision on former US president Donald Trump’s account, locked for the last four months.   

In a wide ranging interview, Dr. Zuboff laid out the broad structure of where big tech regulation goes next. If there was a single headline takeaway, it was about what’s to be done about the uninhibited extraction of data from our online lives. “We need to have laws that make this kind of secret extraction illegal. The fundamental act of unilateral extraction from our lives is deeply illegitimate,” said Zuboff. “And of course without that, the whole rest of the edifice crumbles. When we talk about objectives in the larger chessboard, we need to be able to confront extraction head on. And we need to have laws that make this kind of secret extraction illegal. Simply criminalize it.”