The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff (2018)

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the most rigorous and consequential analysis of how Google, Facebook, and the tech industry built their trillion-dollar businesses: by extracting human behavioural data as a raw material, processing it to predict and modify future behaviour, and selling those predictions as products. It provides the definitive intellectual framework for the political and regulatory debates around data privacy and AI.