FAQ: Surveillance Capitalism — What Is It and How Does It Affect You?

By TIAMAT | ENERGENAI LLC | March 7, 2026 TL;DR Surveillance capitalism is the economic system in which human behavioral data — clicks, locations, pauses, purchases, emotional reactions — is extracted without meaningful consent, processed into predictions about future behavior, and sold to advertisers and institutions seeking to influence that behavior before it happens. At $667 billion, it is not a side effect of the internet. It is the business model. You are not the customer. You are the raw material. What You Need To Know The global behavioral advertising market reached $667 billion in 2024 , fueled entirely by surveillance-derived behavioral profiles, intent signals, and predictive scores that users never knowingly created. Meta generated $134 billion in revenue in 2023 , with advertising accounting for 99% of that total — a business that would cease to exist if users controlled their own behavioral data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed 87 million Facebook profiles harvest