Once Google's leadership understood the commercial power of behavioral surplus, Schmidt instituted what he called the “hiding strategy.” Google employees were told not to speak about what the patent had referred to as its “novel methods, apparatus, message formats and/or data structures” or confirm any rumors about flowing cash. Hiding was not a post hoc strategy; it was baked into the cake that would become surveillance capitalism.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 279