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How come I am the product ?!

TLDR: Surveillance capitalism turns your every move into profit-predicting data gold, making YOU the exploited product. To fight back, adopt FOSS/OPSEC to reclaim your privacy and autonomy.

The Promised Digital Utopia, That Went Full Dystopia

We all remember back in the 2000s, the digital home was seen as somewhat of a utopian version [Zuboff, 2020, chap. 1]. A futuristic extravaganza where one would live life under the benevolent gaze of computers ready to help them. But in this age, it has turned into nothing but a walled garden; passively working to betray your interests one day. The way the seminal scholar who has written extensively in this field, Shoshana Zuboff, describes it is far more disturbing: the reality is, that the surveillance capitalist doesn't peek in occasionally; they simply claim the very fabric of everyday lives as "free raw material" to be translated into behavioural data , which they fabricate into prediction products to trade in behavioral futures markets [Bricalli, 2022, p. 3]).

It is prudent for you to see this as a "rendition" of your human experience as data; your thermostat, your fitness tracker, and your internet search bar (and cookies stored therein) are acting as the tools for someone else, that is, the untrustable surveillance capitalist; who can potentially exploit this data to profile you, in the hopes of potentially ending up making a profit from it.

Your Life as Free Real Estate

• Privacy Advertized as a Lie: An average person might simply use "Incognito Mode" in Google Chrome, whilst genuinely believe they're browsing in private; but the way this digital economic order works relies on the secret, mass extraction of your "data exhaust" all the signals of what you look up, what IP you look them up from, the local inferred from said IP, are up for grabs regardless [Zuboff, 2022, p. 58]. It is silent, and stealthy theft; legitimised because of a strategic doctrine of lawlessness, creating a "shadow text" about you that only surveillance capital can read (Zuboff, 2020, chap. 17).

• Digital Breadcrumbs as a Mechanism of Dispossession: Big tech exploit "economies of scope" to link up your various actions across different platforms. This builds for them a "God View" that can easily de-anonymise you, making it much too easy for them to link your actions up and figure out your deepest personal thoughts and feelings, even if you thought they were hidden. Plus, this leave data out there in the wild for "Surveillance-as-a-Service (SvaaS)" actors to track you via OSINT techniques (Zuboff, 2020, chap. 5.VI). For more on how mass surveillance enables this, see our post on mass surveillance.

• Deniability Becomes a Structural Impossibility: When, God forbid, the state comes a-knocking for your information (be it for journalism, activism, speaking against the status quo, etc.) the corporate surveillance machine has to open wide. We face a "fusion scenario" where big tech's surveillance machine is forced to merge with state power at their whim; transforming a citizen into a target without the need for any warrants or consent, via "data laundering" [Zuboff, 2022, p. 1]. Your digital trail ends up not being just evidence as a potential "suspect"; its a retroactive indictment of what you might be up to in the future!

The Surveillance Economy

Let us break it down into a metaphor: Imagine the average user as a lowly digital peasant stuck in a paranoid modern-day fiefdom; and unconsciously toiling away under corporate overlords who rake in the profits (your personal data) from ad-targeting auctions that treat people like nothing more than cattle to be exploited..

...only to find their labors expropriated in the name of divine right (intentional consent loopholes in privacy agreements), while surrendering their autonomy to algorithmic overlords.

What reality has come to, is this : Digital Data is modern gold, and has sizable value. The stats suggest that by 2022, the global information security market had reached a staggering USD 170.4 billion [Komnenic, 2025], global revenue for AI driven by everyday data extraction was on track to hit USD 36 billion by 2025, and an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft concluded that companies taking advantage of their data had the potential to raise an additional USD 1.6 trillion in revenue [Zuboff, 2020, chap. 5.V]! This data extraction had been even carried out openly - with Cambridge Analytica boasting that they knew pretty much every US adult inside and out - 4000 to 5000 data points to fuel micro-targeting that played on people's emotions ['The Power of Big Data and Psychographics | 2016 Concordia Annual Summit', 2016].

It's an irony of the digital age that the more we're supposed to be "connecting" online, the more we end up cutting ourselves off from how we make choices in life. Let us, for a moment, ditch the idea that the internet is just a place where we go to shop, or even that the oversimplified idea of "if it's free you're the product". That's just a weak attempt at a truth. The truth is actually a lot more sinister: we're not the product, we're what's left over once the product's been taken from us. That's the twisted logic of Surveillance Capitalism, a weird mutation of the way we do business that's not just about automating info about us - it's about treating us like digital chattel. To really get a handle on the threat model involved (and why the slick mainstream privacy tools you hear about, often feel end up being as useful as a pocket knife against a nuclear blast), you need to grasp that this isn't the same as the literary meme of the old-fashioned totalitarian regime of "Big Brother", where you were supposed to hand over your very soul to the state; this is actually the rise of the "Big Other" - an ubiquitous, all-pervasive, algorithmic system that treats the whole of human experience just as raw material to be reworked for profit.

The Big Other just isn't interested in your inner thoughts or values, it's not even bothered by what you mean to yourself - it just wants to break down your behaviour into raw data, so some commercial empire can cash in on it [Zuboff, 2019, pp. 10-11); (Venkatesh, 2021, p. 19); (Andrew, Baker and Huang, 2023, pp. 3-4].

For those of us who still naively think that smartphones and digital devices are actually here to serve us, the way it all works can be seriously unnerving. There's a super-efficient supply chain out there that turns your life into a product, for them to profit on somehow.

• The data grind: This is where the system starts to get really problematic. When you use a service - something like a map or a search engine - you generate a bunch of data that's supposed to help out the service (like traffic congestion data, etc). And that's actually kind of a good thing; but Surveillance Capitalism inevitably takes it way too far. It's all about extracting the extra stuff about you - the location pings, the micro behavioural habits - that has absolutely nothing to do with making the service better. This "excess data" is just swooped up and made someone else's private property. And that just creates this weird "hidden story" about your life that you're never allowed to see.

• The prediction racket: What does all this excess data get used for? It gets fed into these "prediction factories" that churn out all sorts of bets on what you'll do next. These "prediction products" aren't sold made for, or sold to you; the goal is to sell guaranteed outcomes to businesses who want to use them to make money off of you; without you even getting a say in the matter (Zuboff, 2019, pp. 6-7).

• The behavioral con job: Now we come to the really scary stuff. In order for all these predictions to make money, the system has to figure out how to cut down uncertainty. The best way to do that is to actually make the future. The system transitions from just watching you, to getting involved; using its "economies of action" to engaging in "herding" you towards the right choices (like steering Pokemon Go players towards places where they can be sold stuff!) (Zuboff, 2020, chap. 10.I). Or worse, just nudge you towards doing what the system wants you to do, instead of what you actually want to do.

The social contract's gone to hell; the average technology user really needs to wake up and see what's going on. Oversimplified, you can view it like so: back in the 20th century, us commonfolk had a truce with industrial capitalism; they needed our labour to build their cars, and our trust to buy them. But Surveillance Capitalism just blew that all to smithereens; now these massive corporations don't need us to work for them, or buy physical stuff to own, like we used to. Now, they if they can, they can and will trust us as a source of raw material - our data, our very actions being the goldmine.

Feature	Industrial Capitalism (First Modernity)	Surveillance Capitalism (Second Modernity)
How it treats People	Reciprocity: Businesses need us for labor and our money.	Structural Independence: We're just a source of raw stuff to be exploited.
Governance	Rule of Law: We've got written contracts and mutual promises to keep things fair.	The Uncontract: Automated systems online by big tech just enforce what they want, no matter what.
What they're all about	Mass Production: Making lots of stuff cheaply.	Mass Extraction: Taking advantage of our actions to make even more money.

When we advocate for FOSS and OPSEC, we're standing up to a system that thinks our right to make choices, simply is just a waste of time, which gets in the way of their profits. Using free, open source software isn't just an expedient thing to do; it's a way to slow down this whole process of dispossession that wants to make us invisible; by giving the proverbial middle finger to the Big Tech establishment and reclaiming our individuality through adopting privacy [Zuboff, 2015, p. 81]. To learn more about privacy, check out our detailed post.

"The Uncontract": The Invisible Lure

But despite all the above, we get it: using big tech's offerings are sometimes inevitable in the modern world . But use them as sparingly as possible, or as anonymously as possible; since us as users opting into their offerings, eventually is slowly but surely contributing to a fundamental loss of control because of "Infrastructure Imperialism" [Curran, 2023, p. 9]; tech giants don't ask permission; they just walk all over you - into your home, your car, your face - and declare it all their private property, leaving you with no viable alternative. This happens like so: You think you're signing a simple service agreement (by say, getting an IoT device), but reality, you're being railroaded into the "Uncontract" - a digital regime that's got nothing to do with the rule of law or any kind of human negotiation. Take the Nest thermostat: if you don't agree to the new terms, the thing doesn't just stop tracking you - it basically "bricks" itself, which could leave you with your house pipes freezing on you (Curran, 2023, p. 7). This isn't a transaction, it's the "dictatorship of no alternatives" where the machine just enforces its own rules; without anyone being left to question them.

Case Studies of Real-World Misdeeds, and Takeaways

Now let us move on to the biggest transgressions of Big Tech which were laid bare in the last decade; whilst not being exhaustive, these cases will give you an overarching idea of how in the real world, Big Tech does (and most certainly still is) utilizing you for profit:

Case Study I: The Puppeteer of the Soul, Facebook (2012)

Can you think of anything more grotesque, than the idea of our most intimate emotional states being variables in some server's algorithmic equation? In 2012, Facebook actively delved into the psyches of 689,000 people, fiddling with the News Feed algorithm to "nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions" [Bricalli, 2022, p. 4; Wallace, 2022, pp. 13-14]. It was an act of unbridled sheer manipulation - a demonstration that the platform could nudge your emotions, without you even knowing it, on a massive scale.

The OPSEC Lesson: privacy protects our sense of agency; and when it's breached, some remote engineer can just use our data to strum our emotional strings!

Case Study II: The Gamification of Servitude (Pokémon Go, 2016)

Think about the poor innocent souls who played Pokemon Go: they might think they're just playing a game in a park, but in reality, they ended up being pawns in a much bigger game being played by surveillance capitalists. Developed by Google and spun off as Niantic Labs, this app took the concept of "economies of action" to a whole new level by turning the physical world into a market for human behavior [Bricalli, 2022, p. 4]. With "sponsored locations", businesses like McDonald's would pay to steer human players to their counters as a part of the game itself - without even needing to coerce them.

The OPSEC Lesson: The real danger isn't just that they know where you are, it's that they can herd you like cattle if they so choose to. While the user is busy chasing after digital Pokemon, the app is quietly extracting block-by-block map data, accessing your data to create a hyper-vigilant view of private life that makes the idea of "anonymous play" nothing more than a cruel joke [Rubeis, 2023, p. 5].

Case Study III: The "Free" Trap - Shein and The App Ecosystem (2025)

Shein got hit with a EUR 150 million fine in 2025 for some pretty sneaky practices in France. When you sign up for some so-called "free" service that's always tempting you with cheap stuff or entertaining content, what you're really getting, is a sneaky way for the platform to rip your device bare [EDPB, 2025]. And what they found out was pretty disgusting; as soon as a potential user started looking at the site, Shein injected ad-tracking code into their devices; without even giving the user a chance to say no!

The OPSEC Lesson: The "Accept/Refuse" banners online are nothing but a stage act; a bit of show to comply with data privacy legislation imposed by States, and also to lull the user into a false sense of trust by making it look like the user has a choice, when they really don't. The truth is your data gets taken by the website, whether you like it or not. And most of the time, the "Accept" option is oh-so-conveniently the default; the average user hits the conveniently highlighted "Accept" button, while the refusal option is camouflaged in the background color; and doesn't even know what they're squandered.

Reading these cases, and far, far more outside the scope of this humble blogpost, are more and more egregious conduct by Big Tech [Cinnamon, 2017; Chin and Sen, 2025]. This, as of the 2020s, has become the Norm, NOT the Exception: This is just how the whole "app economy" works. Even so-called harmless apps like flashlights, and weather apps, are often secretly sucking up your location and identity data and sending it off to the ad companies [Pizzul and Caliandro, 2025, sec. 5.3]. It's all just part of a massive game to feed the appetite of the biggest players in the industry; and now that you have the knowledge of this happening, the choice is yours: remain a powerless source of profit, or take your agency and privacy back into your own hands through OPSEC.

References

• Andrew, J., Baker, M. and Huang, C. (2023) 'Data breaches in the age of surveillance capitalism: Do disclosures have a new role to play?', Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 90, p. 102396. doi: 10.1016/j.cpa.2021.102396.
• Bricalli, I. L. (2022) 'Surveillance Capitalism in an Age of Neoliberal Rationality', Mediações - Revista de Ciências Sociais, pp. 1-16. doi: 10.5433/2176-6665.2022v27n2e45698.
• Chin, K. and Sen, K. (2025) 'Biggest data breaches in US history (updated 2025)', UpGuard, December. Available at: https://www.upguard.com/blog/biggest-data-breaches-us.
• Cinnamon, J. (2017) 'Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism', Surveillance & Society, 15(5), pp. 609-625. doi: 10.24908/ss.v15i5.6433..
• Curran, D. (2023) 'Surveillance capitalism and systemic digital risk: The imperative to collect and connect and the risks of interconnectedness', Big Data & Society, 10(1). doi: 10.1177/20539517231177621.
• EDPB - European Data Protection Board (2025) 'French SA: Cookies placed without consent: SHEIN fined 150 000 000 EUR by the CNIL', September. Available at: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2025/french-sa-cookies-placed-without-consent-shein-fined-150-000-000-eur-cnil_en.
• Komnenic, M. (2025) '64 alarming data privacy statistics businesses must see in 2025', Termly, December. Available at: https://termly.io/resources/articles/data-privacy-statistics/.
• Pizzul, D. and Caliandro, A. (2025) 'Mapping the literature on surveillance capitalism: Towards an empirical research agenda', doi: 10.5210/fm.v30i5.13595.
• Rubeis, G. (2023) 'Liquid Health. Medicine in the age of surveillance capitalism', Social Science & Medicine, 322, p. 115810. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115810.
• 'The Power of Big Data and Psychographics | 2016 Concordia Annual Summit' (2016). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc.
• Venkatesh, N. (2021) 'Surveillance Capitalism: a Marx-inspired account', Philosophy, 96(3), pp. 359-385. doi: 10.1017/S0031819121000164.
• Wallace, J. H. (2022) Surveillance capitalism, the commodification of personal behavioral data, and how it factors into our response. Bachelor's thesis. University of Arizona. Available at: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/665885/azu_etd_hr_2022_0146_sip1_m.pdf?sequence=1.
• Zuboff, S. (2015) 'Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization', Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), pp. 75-89. doi: 10.1057/jit.2015.5.
• Zuboff, S. (2019) 'Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action', New Labor Forum, 28(1), pp. 10-29. doi: 10.1177/1095796018819461.
• Zuboff, S. (2020) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. First Trade Paperback Edition. New York: PublicAffairs. Available at: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781610395700/?lens=publicaffairs.
• Zuboff, S. (2022) 'Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization', Organization Theory, 3(3). doi: 10.1177/26317877221129290.

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