Indeed, Zuboff plausibly argues that much data extraction today is not a contract or relation at all, in that data just seems to get extracted at a distance. But the wider set of arrangements on which data colonialism relies would be ineffective unless they operated as something like a social form that seems both natural and normal, quite unlike an arbitrary act of theft or extraction. It is this social form we call data relations; data relations enable the basic processes of social construction on which the stabilization of data colonialism depends for the long term.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 134