Why we should be angry about Manchester City, a ‘connected’ scarf and surveillance capitalism

Manchester City want your data and they’re prepared to sell you a scarf to mine it. Why should that bother anybody?

Usually when a company markets a product designed to leech data from its users they at least have the courtesy to pretend to be offering a service in exchange.

When, for example, Google scans your emails to extract and sell millions of data points on your movements, thoughts and feelings, they sneak it past you with a slick app, a quick search feature, an ‘undo send’ button – largely useless stuff masquerading as progress.

So what makes Manchester City’s new ‘connected scarf’ – containing a sensor to track emotional and physiological data – apparently such an egregious attack on supporters’ privacy is the total absence of sales pitch. Nowhere in the promotional material does anybody posit why a supporter might want to own the scarf or how it might benefit them. But who this product is really for, and what purpose it serves, is no mystery. It is not for you.

‘We are excited to share an innovative upgrade to the scarf that allows us to measure those ups and downs and get a better understanding of the emotion at the heart of the world’s beautiful game,’ reads the club statement. Note: allows us to measure. There is nothing here for the supporter and consumer.

The official website is littered with vague platitudes and ominous subtext. ‘We are only just scratching the surface of what the connected scarf can do’ is written in block capitals next to a smiling Aymeric Laporte. ‘We are excited by what we’ll discover.’

NFT should stand for No F***ing Tolerance at all

The club have yet to detail how they will handle privacy concerns once the smart scarf moves out of its pilot phase or indeed how much data will be shared with marketing partners. They did not respond to Football365’s requests for clarification.

In the absence of an explanation or denial of data sharing in the promotional material, should we assume they will be selling and analysing it for profit? It is the underlying principle of all ‘smart’ devices, and certainly those that don’t even allow the user to access any of the data, let alone give a reason why the consumer should want the product.

That is a big problem. As Soshana Zuboff details in her seminal book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the emergence of the ‘internet of things’ is potentially the biggest threat to democracy and free will in human history.

This may sound like an…