Google brought new life to these practices. As had occurred at Ford a century earlier, the company’s engineers and scientists were the first to conduct the entire commercial surveillance symphony, integrating a wide range of mechanisms from cookies to proprietary analytics and algorithmic software capabilities in a sweeping new logic that enshrined surveillance and the unilateral expropriation of behavioral data as the basis for a new market form. The impact of this invention was just as dramatic as Ford’s. In 2001, as Google’s new systems to exploit its discovery of behavioral surplus were being tested, net revenues jumped to $86 million (more than a 400 percent increase over 2000), and the company turned its first profit. By 2002, the cash began to flow and has never stopped, definitive evidence that behavioral surplus combined with Google’s proprietary analytics were sending arrows to their marks. Revenues leapt to $347 million in 2002, then $1.5 billion in 2003, and $3.5 billion in 2004, the year the company went public. The discovery of behavioral surplus had produced a stunning 3,590 percent increase in revenue in less than four years.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 273