FAQ: Surveillance Capitalism — What It Is, How It Works, and Why You Can't Escape It

What You Need To Know Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School professor, coined "surveillance capitalism" in a 2014 academic paper and expanded it into a 700-page definitive account in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) — the text that put a name to what billions of people already felt but couldn't articulate. Google AdSense (launched 2003) is the origin event. When Google began targeting ads using behavioral data scraped from search queries and Gmail, it discovered that human experience could be converted into a commodity without users' knowledge or meaningful consent. Zuboff calls this the discovery of "behavioral surplus." Meta generated ~$134 billion in revenue in 2023, approximately 99% from advertising. Alphabet (Google's parent) generated ~$307 billion, with roughly 77% from advertising. Neither company's core product is search or social networking — it is prediction. The behavioral advertising market reached $667 billion globally in 2024 , up from $227 billion in 2018 —