Zuboff brings the savage receipts

Zuboff’s thesis is simple: Big Tech didn’t invent better ads; they invented a new racket. Your clicks, your location, your late-night doom scrolls — all strip-mined as “behavioral surplus,” turned into prediction products, and used to nudge you until you behave the way their models want. Not “customer service.” Behavioral control with a friendly color palette.

What it’s really saying (no corporate perfume)

• Nothing is free. “Free” means your life is the payment plan. If you’re not paying, congrats — your future is the product.
• Instrumentarian power. This isn’t ideology; it’s infrastructure. Phones, TVs, cars, classrooms — every surface becomes a sensor with a sales quota.
• Enclosures 2.0. Yesterday they fenced land. Today they fence human experience and charge rent on your attention.
  
  

What Zuboff nails

• Language that cuts. “Behavioral surplus,” “prediction products,” “means of behavioral modification.” Once you learn these, you can’t unsee the scam. Every “personalized experience” reads like, “we’re farming you, sweetheart.”
• Receipts, not vibes. She traces how Google discovered your data exhaust was rocket fuel, and how Facebook showed up with a tanker truck. The incentives are the crime.
• Moral clarity. No both-sides mush. This isn’t “innovation culture.” It’s extraction with UX glitter.
  
  

Where it drags (yeah, I said it)

• Windy as the L.I.E. at rush hour. Stunning ideas, but the book circles back like a GPS having a panic attack. Could’ve lost 100 pages and nobody would cry.
• Light on tactics. The diagnosis is surgical; the treatment plan is “call your representatives.” Necessary, but you finish hungry for a wrench and a kill switch.

Zuboff Brings the Savage Receipts

1. Google (Location): “Location History off” didn’t mean off. AP caught Google still tracking; 40 states later nailed a $391.5M settlement, plus California’s own case. AP News+1Oregon Department of JusticeHunton Andrews Kurth
2. Google (Incognito): Settled a class action by agreeing to delete or de-identify billions of “private browsing” records. Incognito, my ass. The Verge
3. Google (the blender): In 2016 it quietly dropped the wall between DoubleClick ad data and personally identifiable info. “Personalization” = data smoothie. ProPublica
4. Meta/Facebook: Record $5B FTC penalty for privacy abuses; separate $725M class settlement over Cambridge Analytica; plus that “security” VPN that spied for competitive intel until Apple booted it. Federal Trade Commission+1bfalaw.comTechCrunch+1
5. Amazon + Alexa: Humans were listening to your clips until the heat forced an opt-out; the feds then hit Amazon for keeping kids’ voice and geolocation data. Bloomberg.com+1Federal Trade Commission+1Justice
6. Ring (Amazon): FTC said employees/contractors had improper access to customer videos; refunds followed. Ring has also shared footage with police without consent under “emergencies.” Your doorbell’s a snitch. Federal Trade Commission+2Federal Trade Commission+2ReutersAP News
7. Smart TVs (Vizio): 11 million sets tracked what people watched, second-by-second, then sold it. Settled with the FTC. “Smart” meant “spy” until they were caught. Federal Trade Commission+1
8. Security cams (Eufy & Wyze): Eufy’s “local-only” cams could be streamed unencrypted from afar; Wyze glitched so badly 13,000 users saw other people’s homes. Trust? Vaporized. The Verge+1Ars Technica
9. Ed-tech: HRW found many government-endorsed learning tools surveilled kids at a “dizzying” scale during COVID. “For the children,” sure. Human Rights Watch+1
10. Cars: Mozilla crowned the entire category a privacy hellscape — the worst they’ve ever reviewed. Your SUV doubles as a data broker. Mozilla Foundation

And these are just a small sampling of the egregious and invasive practices of Silicon Valley

Should you read it?

Yeah. It’s the field guide to the invisible shakedown you live in. It won’t hand you a silver bullet, but it gives you the vocabulary and backbone to call BS when “personalization” shows up with jazz hands.