“In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users… Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behaviour by any means available in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends.” (Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism)

Zuboff spends a lot of time in the first few chapters of the book looking at Google as the pioneers of surveillance capitalism. One of the more interesting parts is the way the founders of Google initially rejected advertising. They were focused on building the best search technology. The behavioural data was only used to make their Search better, an exchange that users were willing to make. However, the dot-com financial crisis put a lot of pressure on them from their investors to figure out how to become profitable—and fast—so they pivoted and discovered how valuable that behavioural data was when being used in ways not for the benefit of the users. In four years they went from making no profit to $3.2 billion. By 2017 they were one of the top two companies in he world.

Again, Zuboff's point here is that the use of the technology in this way was not inevitable. It was result of deliberate choices made by specific people at specific times.