I’m having a hard time trying to decide if people are trying to dirty capitalism with “surveillance” or surveillance with capitalism. Seems like the latter has become a dirty word over night for no apparent reason.
Surveillance capitalism simply describes the business model of spying on users to build hidden psychological / behavioural / demographic profiles which are then sold through opaque backroom market mechanisms, all with zero regard to consent.
You can have a positive view of each separate word (depending on context) and the term still works perfectly in describing the business model society is beginning to reject, through mechanisms like the GDPR and CCPA.
* Google Chrome: mandatory
* Firefox: opt-out [1]
* Brave: blocked
That's the primary issue.
It's great that Brave is pioneering a new opt-in, privacy-respecting funding model for the web - we need innovation here - but it's a secondary issue.
[1] Thanks to Google $, slowly changing presumably thanks to forcing effects of Apple's increasing privacy defaults in Safari