THE ALGORITHMIC SURVEILLANCE DEVICE: tracking algorithms, smartphones, and data collection
Device; Trackers; Smartphones; Algorithms; Surveillance.
The doctoral research presents considerations about mobile communication artifacts and the production of a subjectivity focused on a surveillance device. The focus is on the use of data-tracking algorithms, the search includes trackers for operating systems for mobile devices in more detail but also using trackers for internet browsers (browsers). The understanding is that capitalism prepares the ground for the modulation of specific subjectivities through the practicality and entertainment provided by technological devices, which would be inserted in a more comprehensive device of algorithmic surveillance. The role of the smartphone would be the open path to the agreement of data delivery supported both in voluntary cooperation of users and in the use of data-tracking algorithms in practice known as tracking. Bibliographic research is the main methodology employed, as research categories are based on the concept of Foucauldian device so that this concept is used as the method itself for the delimitation of the components of the algorithmic device; consequently, this author is the main theoretical reference used (FOUCAULT, 1996; 2008b; 2014; 2018). However, Bruno's theoretical perspective (2013); Bauman and Lyon (2013); Lazzarato (2014; 2006); and Deleuze (1988; 2000) are also widely present. The work argues that the Foucauldian disciplinary society was not of all substitution by the control society, much less its surveillance devices were banished, but rather that these devices take new forms through the broad spectrum of modulation acquired by the communicational technological devices.