The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues something specific and important: today’s data economy was not an inevitable result of digital technology. A particular group of companies built it, deliberately, at a specific moment in time. Shoshana Zuboff makes that case across nearly seven hundred pages, and it has become one of the most cited books in privacy and cybersecurity scholarship.

Zuboff earned her PhD in social psychology from Harvard, taught at Harvard Business School as a professor emerita, and previously taught at Harvard Law School. Few scholars bring that combination of psychology, business, and legal training to a single argument about how technology companies actually behave.

The book traces what Zuboff calls behavioral surplus: extracting more data from users than any product actually needs. That surplus then gets used to predict and shape future behavior. She walks through how this model took hold at scale and the instrumentation power it created. She traces the loss of individual autonomy that follows when prediction becomes control.

Anyone working in cybersecurity or privacy who has not read this book will eventually run into colleagues who assume they have. The extensive notes are worth reading in full, not skimming past.

Recommended for privacy and security professionals who want the foundational text behind terms like surveillance capitalism and behavioral surplus. Both now appear constantly in policy debates.

Originally published in ISSA Journal’s "The Cyber Library" column, March-April 2026 issue, by Jay Carson, Semper Sec’s Cyber Librarian. Read more at issa.org.