"Data is the new oil", according to The Economist. [1]

Sounds perfectly normal, doesn't it?

But who is getting drilled so that this new oil can be extracted?

You.

Do they have your consent?

Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School tells us that Big Data is not a natural process. Data are not generated, and much less stored, on their own.

We live in a new economic system, one that she calls Surveillance Capitalism. [2]

Everything we do online is registered and matched with data from other sources such as banks, payment systems, supermarkets, airlines, hospitals and security cameras.

Any time we talk about extraction, Zuboff says, it should be clear that there's no consent and no reciprocity. Someone is extracting other people's data and exploiting them.

And hardly anybody is worried about it.