Zuboff, a retired Harvard Business School professor, assumes the role of social anthropologist, arguing that this scheme of surveillance and the marketplace it serves pose a threat not just to conventional notions of privacy but to our autonomy as individual beings, and ultimately to a democratic society. What has become news is the shockingly cavalier manner in which these companies (Facebook in particular) tend to treat this resource and the blatantly insincere apologies they offer in response. This is not news to anyone who reads the papers. Our leftover data trails make up the resource she calls “behavioral surplus,” a by-product that’s key to the success of two of the world’s most highly valued companies, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Facebook, and increasingly Amazon and Microsoft.

Zuboff’s scheme of things, is what happens when companies scoop up the data we leave behind as we go about our digital lives and use it to their own commercial ends. Expect that trend to kick into overdrive now that Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is out, for hers is the rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical-in this case, the quandary raised by Google and Facebook when they figured out how to fashion the data exhaust of our everyday lives into, as she puts it, “prediction products”: little oracles that anticipate our intentions and offer them up to anyone willing to pay. At that point, sparked perhaps by the Cold War, it started turning up more and more frequently, a trend that continues to this day. Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty ImagesĪccording to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which measures the appearance in books of a given phrase over time, the word “surveillance”-from the French sur + veiller, “to watch over”-saw relatively little use until about 1960. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen on a screen speaking during a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees on April 10, 2018.

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