An economic system in which personal data generated through everyday digital activity is continuously collected, analyzed, and monetized by corporations in order to predict and influence human behavior. Rather than simply selling products or services, companies extract behavioral information such as clicks, movements, purchases, social ties, and emotional signals, transforming this “data exhaust” into predictive models that can be sold to advertisers, insurers, political campaigns, or other third parties. In this model, human experience itself becomes raw material for profit, with users functioning less as customers and more as sources of behavioral surplus.
The term was developed and popularized by Shoshana Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where she argues that major technology platforms pioneered a new form of market power based not on producing goods but on controlling information flows and shaping future behavior. Critics contend that surveillance capitalism erodes privacy, autonomy, and democratic agency by subtly steering choices through recommendation engines, targeted messaging, and algorithmic nudges. In creative and labor contexts, it also underpins the attention economy, as the capture of engagement data fuels both monetization strategies and the pressure to produce ever more content for measurement and manipulation.