The saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product' is often cited to differentiate between companies that respect your privacy by charging you for a service and those that desire to make money off your personal information.
Sadly, this is not true. In both cases, your personal information, by and large, is being monetized. Whether you pay for a service, or receive it for free, you are being watched, tracked, and manipulated for profit.
A free market, capitalist system in its most simplistic form, involves the exchange of goods and services for money with as little interference from the government as possible. In the not-so-distant past, companies would do market research, innovate and develop products, and then market them to the public, hoping to drive interest and lead to sales.
But Steve Jobs offered insight into a new way of thinking about the old saying “know your customer.”
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.” - Steve Jobs
This sentiment is the essence of a new form of capitalism, deemed “Surveillance Capitalism,” a term popularized by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff in her book by the same name.
Surveillance capitalism is a newer, and more sinister, version of capitalism that relies on gathering and exploiting personal data through large-scale surveillance. This phenomenon is different from government surveillance, although they often reinforce each other as we’ll get into shortly. In this model, companies collect, analyze, and use vast amounts of user data to predict and shape human behavior, usually for commercial purposes.
Surveillance capitalism involves companies extensively collecting user data from online activities without explicit consent although we all agree to their terms of service which are purposely hard to understand as we have moved far beyond generalized advertising.