Books like Niche Envy by Joseph Turow

Digital Minimalism shows how reducing everyday technology use can improve well‑being, offering a practical strategy to reclaim free time and focus on meaningful activities.

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Bruce Schneier’s investigative analysis explores the growth of Mass surveillance in the United States, examining how data collection, electronic surveillance, and national security practices shape privacy and social control.

Jonah Berger reveals how unsuspected social pressures shape our buying habits, career moves, and everyday choices, blending business, psychology, and social science insights to expose the hidden forces behind human behavior.

Joseph Turow exposes how retailers—from Macy's to Walmart—are using in‑store data mining, tracking and predictive analytics to understand and influence shoppers, raising serious privacy concerns.

"The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me - and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don't know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don't know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a "target" or "waste" or placed in one of the industry's finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online? Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets -and what can be done to stop it"--