Big Tech Corporations in Brazilian Higher Education: Pathways toward Public Education Platformization

Abstract

This article examines how the entry of Big Tech companies into Brazilian public universities impacts one of the primary public spaces dedicated to human formation. The study is fundamentally grounded in José van Dijck's work, who proposes understanding society through the concept of platformization, alongside dialogue with Zuboff's surveillance capitalism (2020) and Nussbaum's theory of human capabilities (2012, 2015). To analyze the context experienced by institutions that have adopted these corporations' services, five Brazilian federal universities were selected. Their institutional documents – specifically, Institutional Development Plans, Information Technologies Management Plans, and agreements signed between universities and Google or Microsoft for application provision – were analyzed, complemented by questionnaires administered to information technology managers. The findings indicate that the entry of Big Tech into these universities generates not only increasing technological dependence but also significant interference in administrative and academic processes. This occurs primarily through the induced use of tools focused on numerical data analysis related to task performance, which compromises the comprehensive formation of human capabilities. The presence of these major foreign technology corporations in Brazilian public universities induces a process of public education platformization, undermining educators' autonomy and promoting educational privatization through algorithmic surveillance and educational data monetization.