Surveillance capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is an economic model in which companies capture personal data, infer behavioral patterns, and use predictions to generate revenue or influence choices.

Behavioral surplus: Personal data collected beyond what is needed to provide a service, repurposed for prediction and commercial gain. It names the excess data that surveillance-capitalist firms turn into predictive products.
Shoshana Zuboff: An American social psychologist and scholar of technology and work who developed the concept of surveillance capitalism. Her writing established the model's central vocabulary and critique.
Informational privacy: The ability to control access to and use of information about oneself. Extensive collection and reuse of personal data challenge control over personal information.
Platform capitalism: An economic model in which digital platforms mediate interactions and derive value from their position between users and businesses. It emphasizes platform control and intermediation, while surveillance capitalism centers on extracting behavioral data.
Datafication: The conversion of actions, relationships, and events into data that can be stored and analyzed. Surveillance capitalism depends on making more aspects of life measurable.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book analyzing the extraction of personal data for prediction and behavioral influence. This book presents the fullest account of the concept and its historical development.
Contextual integrity: A theory of privacy in which information flows are appropriate when they fit social contexts and their norms. Data reuse can violate expectations even when information was initially shared willingly.
Data capitalism: An economic system in which data is treated as a source of value, control, and competitive advantage. This broader model may involve data-driven profits without the same emphasis on behavioral prediction and influence.
Machine learning: A family of computational methods that find patterns in data and use them to make predictions or decisions. These methods extract predictive value from accumulated behavioral records.
Google: A technology company founded in 1998 that operates a search engine, advertising business, and many digital services. Google's use of search data for targeted advertising became a prominent early case in Zuboff's account.

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