After reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, you’ll either be convinced that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al. are the most diabolical villains in history or you’ll laugh off the book as anecdote-driven hysteria. To the credit of the author, Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff, the book is an incredibly comprehensive and well-researched review of how the tech giants make money and the tactics they employ to collect and monetize data. But she would be far more persuasive if she reined in the hyperbole.

By her telling, tech firms are “vampires” and tyrannical. Here’s just one sample:

Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’état in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse that is Big Other.

And that’s one of her tamer passages.

She defines “Big Other” as a ubiquitous, sensate, and networked infrastructure that relies on “instrumentarian” power. She goes to great lengths to invent new words and new terms to describe how the tech giants not only collect our data but control our lives and even dictate our actions. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

If you want to distill the book to central themes, one need only rely on Zuboff’s definitions for “instrumentarian” and “surveillance capitalism,” two terms she invented. The former is defined as a means of power that knows and shapes behavior toward Big Others’ desired ends. The latter takes literally half a page to define, but broadly it’s a “new economic order” that relies on “parasitic” logic and behavioral modification to expropriate critical human rights. If you thought Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler were bad, wait until you meet the chief executives of the tech giants. That’s not my hyperbole; Zuboff includes those monsters in her book, which seems like a quick way to lose thoughtful readers.

Where’s the consumer harm? / Even the staunchest libertarians acknowledge companies make mistakes. That’s the point of competitive markets: allowing other players to take advantage when the market leader stumbles. However, after reading Zuboff’s description of the extensive data collection practices of the tech giants, one wonders how, exactly, consumers are harmed. Sure, the concept of Google Glass—the wearable device that looked like eyeglasses and included a camera and facial recognition technology—scared some people. But if Google were so effectively evil, why didn’t Google Glass catch on? The tech giants enter products and services into the market frequently and some fail miserably (e.g., MySpace, Google+).

It never seems to occur to Zuboff that people may generally like the goods Google, Microsoft, and Facebook provide. Instead, she posits that we patronize these companies because we’re forced to and because they employ behavioral modification techniques. One example of such modification is when Facebook changes its algorithm on election day to show people that their friends have voted, which tends to boost voting. Thus, Facebook can increase election turnout. Yes, peer pressure works. Advertisements work. The tech giants use a 21st century version of advertisement and modern technology to make our lives easier.

Firms have been collecting information about consumers for generations. What seems to upset Zuboff is that tech firms are increasingly doing this from inside our homes, controlling our thermostats and serving as our personal assistants (e.g., Google Home, Amazon’s Echo). For those fearful that this invades our privacy, there is a simple preventative: don’t buy these products. Yet, according to Zuboff, there is little any of us can do to ward off the “totalitarian” impulses of the tech overlords.

Today’s privacy debate probably should revolve around the “reasonable expectation of privacy,” which is a term in Fourth Amendment law, but it has relevance to our relationship with the tech giants as well. Most people realize that by using Facebook and Google, they are consenting to those firms’ data collection practices. Similarly, traveling in public reduces people’s expectation of privacy: government and corporations can use traffic cameras and cell phone geolocation to track people’s movement, for instance. For government, people have no option to “turn off location services.” However, consumers fed up with Google and Facebook can choose a non-Android phone, use another search engine, or simply delete their Facebook account. That’s not hard, and it’s not “mind control” or “Chinese brainwashing” to consent to use their services. If you’re curious, the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra mind-control program does make an appearance in the book, and readers’ eyes will roll after seeing the comparisons Zuboff makes between it and tech company practices.

Just as Google Maps routinely tracks individuals to determine their location to help users get from place to place—a practice that once required either fumbling with maps or owning an expensive GPS—so too do tech-based games like Pokémon Go. This frightens Zuboff and she lists a parade of horribles resulting from the game—which has largely died out in the United States. Back when it was popular, perhaps people played it because they enjoyed it and enjoyed competing with their friends. Not according to Zuboff, though; Pokémon Go is an elaborate behavioral modification tool that she deems “exploitation-ware” because it relies on augmented reality to herd collective behavior. Yet, Nintendo’s 1985 video game classic Super Mario Brothers also attracted millions of players around the world, but no one compared it to MKUltra. The interactive shooter game Fortnite is certainly herding collective behavior of adolescents everywhere. Are its creators also exploitative—or worse?

Here again, readers should be struck by Zuboff’s failure to provide evidence of consumer harm. Sure, the book is filled with anecdotes about how towns and individuals have been inconvenienced by Pokémon Go and Google Maps, but what is the tort? What is the cause of action or corporate practice that warrants her comparisons to mass murder? If there is corporate malfeasance leading to a massive data breach and people’s identities are stolen, then they should sue away. But data security and theft aren’t Zuboff’s primary concern; rather, she opposes the data’s very collection.

Perhaps her strongest argument, which she does not exploit at length in the book, relies on antitrust grounds. In concentrated markets where tech giants buy up competitors one-by-one, consumer advocates often appeal to regulators for relief. There is even a handy (if flawed) index the Justice Department uses to measure market concentration: the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. Yet, readers will find no mention of the index in her book. They will find plenty of wildly hyperbolic language, though.

How to tame the giants / One might assume that somewhere in the tome’s 700 pages there is a comprehensive plan to address these data collection and “behavioral modification” practices. But there is little such discussion, even in the 30-page (!) conclusion.

Instead, there are mentions of how Europe is addressing privacy practices through its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). She calls these laws “vital and necessary.” But then, a few pages later, she mentions that Google and Facebook continue to flourish despite antitrust investigations, GDPR, and multi-billion-dollar fines.

Left unstated is how regulation has helped to entrench these firms’ market power. According to an early policy analysis of GDPR, which is still in its infancy, the regulation has caused job losses approaching 30,000, double-digit declines in venture capital investments, and billions of dollars in compliance costs. Yet, the tech giants and their armies of lawyers can comply with those regulatory interventions. Judging by the decline in venture capital, many burgeoning companies cannot. Even larger companies like the LA Times, which still does not comply with GDPR, are affected.

If regulation and fines won’t work, perhaps breaking up the tech giants is the only option. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), who has staked her presidential campaign on progressive policy proposals, has called for dismantling Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In her view, a company is de facto too big if its revenues exceed $25 billion. Her post on Medium unveiling this proposal did not describe the logic or economics behind the $25 billion figure. BP and ExxonMobil had revenues exceeding $240 billion in 2018. Remember when their “bigness” incited calls to break up large oil companies? By Zuboff and Warren’s thinking, not only is big bad, but the relatively benign practice of data collection is also cause for increased antitrust scrutiny.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the book is that there is no discussion of the balancing of costs and benefits in tech. Are there costs to having a few large platforms dominate search functions and online advertising? Yes. But there are also benefits from large companies providing goods and services that we largely enjoy, and there would be incalculable costs for breaking up those companies.

Let’s not forget the benefits of these companies providing countless jobs, with high wages and employee benefits. Zuboff views these benefits as bugs and not features of the tech giants. She writes, “The huge salaries of the tech firms have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the next generation of students.” So, among the tech companies’ other sins, apparently, is compensating their employees well.

Conclusion / Few will complain that Zuboff’s book is under-researched. Its endnotes section alone is roughly 130 pages. However, her demonization of the tech giants and name-checking Mao, Stalin, and Hitler will turn off most readers quickly. To her, the tech giants are so evil she has to invent a dozen terms to describe just how abusive their practices are.

She’ll be pleased to know that some people—even libertarians—detest the business practices of the tech giants and this will cause declines in their market share. “Delete Facebook” has been a popular search term for the past five years and peaked on March 18, 2018 (thanks, Google Search Trends) during the height of the Cambridge Analytica news. Markets can turn away from the tech giants as quickly as they embraced their new technology if company business practices become objectionable for too many consumers.

What won’t help is more regulation that causes barriers-to-entry for potential competitors. Zuboff seems to recognize this but, sadly, spends few words acknowledging this reality.