Surveillance Capitalism is a logic of capitalist accumulation in which personal user data is extracted, processed, and commodified by mostly private companies using artificial intelligence to predict and modify human behavior for profit. It builds on using private data that is produced through interactions with modern technologies as raw material to create predictions about current and future human behavior, which are sold to a wide range of customers, including advertisers, insurance companies, law enforcement, and other entities seeking to influence actions, decisions, and market behaviors.
In contrast to other forms of capitalism, which profit from goods and services and commodify natural resources or human labor, Surveillance Capitalism generates revenue by tracking, analyzing, and manipulating human behavior at scale. The surveillance component relates to the fact that the collection of data often occurs without meaningful user awareness or consent, creating significant asymmetries of knowledge and power between corporations and individuals. Rather than being customers, users constitute the raw material of a hidden marketplace where their future behaviors are predicted, traded, and shaped. The rise of Surveillance Capitalism raises fundamental concerns about privacy, autonomy, democracy, and human rights. By commodifying and manipulating private human experience and shifting control over information and decision-making to private technology firms, Surveillance Capitalism risks alienating humans from their own lived experiences and establishes new forms of social control.
This system directly threatens human rights such as the Right to Privacy and Freedom of Thought and Opinion and creates significant ethical questions relating to human autonomy, agency, and consent. Especially in light of the critical importance of services like messengers, social networks, cars, or digital payment systems in daily life, individuals often have little choice but to subject their experiences to the working mechanism of Surveillance Capitalism, making meaningful consent to data extraction nearly impossible. Addressing these risks requires legal, technological, and societal safeguards to ensure that digital markets serve the interests of people rather than subordinating them to corporate profit.
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