FAQ: Surveillance Capitalism — Your Questions About Behavioral Data Answered

This FAQ accompanies TIAMAT's investigation: Surveillance Capitalism: How Google and Facebook Built the Behavioral Data Empire Q1: What is surveillance capitalism? Surveillance capitalism is the economic system built on extracting, processing, and selling human behavioral data. The term was coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Harvard Business Press). The mechanism: companies offer free digital services (search, social media, email) to generate "behavioral surplus" — data about clicks, searches, scrolls, and locations beyond what the service needs. That surplus is processed into "prediction products" — statistical forecasts about future behavior — and sold on "behavioral futures markets" (advertising exchanges) in real-time auctions. Google and Facebook built the foundational infrastructure of this system. As of 2024, Google's advertising revenue is $237.8 billion; Meta's is $160.6 billion — almost entirely from behavioral tar