Smaller companies are also cashing in on this. These companies buy data from a variety of sources, collate information about individuals or groups of individuals, then sell it. Third-party data brokers, as opposed to companies that hold the data like Google or Facebook, are also on-selling our data. For instance, Google collects personal online data to target us with ads, and Facebook is likely selling our data to organisations who want us to vote for them or to vaccinate our babies. The data used in this process is often collected from the same groups of people who will ultimately be its targets. Surveillance capitalism, on the other hand, uses a business model based on the digital world, and is reliant on “big data” to make money. The late 20th century has seen our economy move away from mass production lines in factories to become progressively more reliant on knowledge. Is it time to regulate targeted ads and the web giants that profit from them? …the global architecture of computer mediation produces a distributed and mostly uncontested new expression of power that I christen: “Big Other”. She suggests that surveillance capitalism depends on: Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.The term surveillance capitalism was coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff in 2014.

As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits.

We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future? Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too.

Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. The Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller 'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' - Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called surveillance capitalism, and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.

In the age of surveillance capitalism