“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Dr. Shoshana Zuboff is perhaps the most quoted book on surveillance capitalism. It is about big tech companies that give us free apps and online tools while mining and collecting behavioural surplus data about our demographics, locations, and behaviours and selling it for insane profits or even manipulating public opinions and rigging our democratic establishments.
It took me half a year to finish reading this book. It’s over 500 pages long, and the pages are wordy and dense. It’s a commitment, but this book has valuable historical information and stories about how well-known search engines, social media, Smart devices and IoT platform companies stayed ahead of the legal system while mining our data, made us believe that opting out of their idea of “Future” wasn’t an option, and how they hid their unethical practices behind the barriers of intellectual properties protections.