ROME, July 20 — In the quiet corridors of the digital economy, a transformation unfolding far from the glare of political summits has begun to redraw the lines of power. Against this backdrop, the concept of surveillance capitalism—first articulated by Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff—has matured from an academic warning into a pervasive economic logic that now shapes how personal data is collected, commodified, and sold. Surveillance capitalism is distinct from government surveillance, though the two can be mutually reinforcing.
At its core lies a profit-making incentive, born in the early days of targeted advertising when companies like Google, through its AdWords platform, realised the value of precise consumer targeting. Zuboff has described this as “a new logic of accumulation”.
Vincent Mosco noted in 2014 that the marketing of customer information to advertisers constitutes surveillance capitalism, and made explicit reference to the surveillance state that operates alongside it. Christian Fuchs has argued that the surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism, and Zuboff notes that this fusion is further complicated by deeply invisible collaborative arrangements with state security apparatuses.
The mechanics of extraction
Personal data points increased in value once the possibilities of targeted advertising became widely understood. The rising price of such data has limited its purchase to the richest actors in society—corporations and governments. In practice, personal smartphone data can be collected by corporate equipment that pretends to be cell telephone towers, tracking and monitoring private persons in public spaces, and this data is then sold to governments or other companies.
Zuboff contrasts the mass production of industrial capitalism with the logic of surveillance capitalism. Industrial capitalism was interdependent with its populations—they were its consumers and employees.
Surveillance capitalism, by contrast, preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and who remain largely ignorant of its procedures. The wider picture: surveillance has been changing power structures in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power further from nation-states and towards large corporations that employ the surveillance capitalist logic.
Beyond the firm
Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism extends beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, and it operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent. The combination of analysing massive data sets and using those data sets as a market mechanism has shaped the entire concept.
For Google and Facebook, this mutation resulted in the collection of very large numbers of data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a profit by selling these data points to external users, particularly advertisers. What to watch next: as corporate power in the information economy grows, European regulators are increasingly scrutinising these practices.
The European perspective, forged in the corridors of Brussels and national capitals, has long emphasised data protection as a fundamental right. Against this backdrop, the question of how to rein in an economic logic that operates without meaningful consent remains the central policy challenge of the digital age.
