Surveillance Capitalism
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What it is
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An economic system built around capturing and commodifying personal data for profit — most visibly through large ad networks, but extending to any company that shares or sells user data to third-party data brokers.
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Why it matters
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It's distinct from government mass surveillance in motive (profit rather than state control) but often just as pervasive — ad networks operated by a handful of companies track activity across the vast majority of the web, far beyond the sites they directly operate. And the danger isn't limited to obviously ad-driven companies: any company can pass your data to a data broker, so a service having no visible ads doesn't mean your data is safe from this system.
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How it works
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Content/tracker blockers and reading privacy policies help against basic tracking but can't fully prevent it. The stronger defense is making your data harder to correlate in the first place — encrypting or obfuscating it so different providers can't be linked together into a single profile of you.
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