Shoshana Zuboff's concept of surveillance capitalism describes an economic logic in which human experience is claimed as free raw material for behavioural prediction products. Platforms do not sell goods to users — they sell predictions about users to advertisers. The product is not the app; the product is you, or more precisely, a model of your future behaviour. This system operates through an information asymmetry so profound that users cannot meaningfully understand what is being extracted from them, let alone consent to it. The result, Zuboff argues, is not merely a privacy issue but an existential challenge to human autonomy: when behaviour can be predicted and nudged at scale, the conditions for genuine self-determination erode. Regulation exists but has struggled to keep pace with the speed and opacity of the systems involved.

💡 Did you know? Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day. Each search is a behavioural signal. The company's market capitalisation — built almost entirely on advertising revenue derived from that data — exceeded $1.5 trillion in 2024.