Shoshana Zuboff has written The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, one of the most powerful and acute books of the twenty-first century so far.

She's an absolutely enthralling person: exact, current, knowledgeable, smart, intelligent, and wise. Hear her out, and please read her book.

Here's a good explanation of what surveillance capitalism is:

Surveillance capitalism is not the same as digital technology. It is an economic logic that has hijacked the digital for its own purposes. The logic of surveillance capitalism begins with unilaterally claiming private human experience as free raw material for production and sales. It wants your walk in the park, online browsing and communications, hunt for a parking space, voice at the breakfast table …

These experiences are translated into behavioural data. Some of this data may be applied to product or service improvements, and the rest is valued for its predictive power. These flows of predictive data are fed into computational products that predict human behaviour. A leaked Facebook document in 2018 describes its machine-learning system that “ingests trillions of data points every day” and produces “more than 6m predictions per second”. Finally, these prediction products are sold to business customers in markets that trade in human futures.

Zuboff, S. (2019, July 2). It’s Not That We’ve Failed To Rein In Facebook And Google. We’ve Not Even Tried | Shoshana Zuboff. The Guardian. Retrieved November 14, 2019, from https://web.archive.org/web/20191114132559/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/facebook-google-data-change-our-behaviour-democracy

Here follows a synopsis for the video that's embedded above:

Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon - the biggest names in technology - are all in the same business: spying on you. But what does this mean? Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff traces the currents that led us here and asks how human freedom can be saved.

The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism | Shoshana Zuboff. Retrieved November 14, 2019, from https://iai.tv/video/shoshana-zuboff-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism