Our information, our transactions, our preferences, likes and dislikes are not just being used to sell us stuff but to modify our behaviour.

Harvard University Professor Shoshana Zuboff's ground-breaking best seller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power describes the pervasive commodification of our personal (digital) information.

Professor Zuboff coined the phrase "Surveillance Capitalism" which she defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”.

Technology companies gather our data, not just to predict our preferences, but also to influence and modify our behaviour. In 1986, just one per cent of the world’s information was digitised but by 2013 only 2 per cent of the world's information was NOT digitised. Zuboff says this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom.

There’s no way to dress this up as anything but behavioural modification says Shoshana Zuboff. Advertisers have gone past wanting to know and cater for our preferences, they want to shape what we like and even how we behave.

“With so little left that could be commodified, the last virgin territory was private human experience,” said Professor Zuboff.

The great industrial power struggles of the twentieth century were between capital and labour. That has all changed.

In the twenty-first century, "surveillance capitalists are pitted against the entirety of our societies in a bloodless battle for power and profit as violent as any the world has seen," said Shoshana Zuboff.

After a lifetime of research, Professor Zuboff is issuing a warning to all of us. Our privacy rights are being eroded and will soon be a thing of the past. Shoshana Zuboff is calling us to action to demand protection of our democratic rights and freedoms.

"If we are to bend the arc of the digital back toward the light, we need public education, democratic mobilization, and political leadership.

"We need the creativity and courage to revitalize our frameworks of human rights, laws, and regulations for a new epoch. This next decade is pivotal.  It’s all hands on deck."

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