Shoshana Zuboff is the author of a new book “The age of surveillance capitalism”. Dr. Zuboff explains how behavioral data collection starting with Google search became valuable as a way to predict our behavior. These data often collected without our conscious awareness has great financial value.
If this topic is of interest, she was interviewed by Leo Laporte for the Triangulation podcast and is an informative listen.
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/380?autostart=false