Google knows you’re pregnant. Spotify knows your favorite throwback jams. Is this convenient or creepy? It depends. One minute, you’re grateful for the personalized precision of Netflix’s recommendations. The next, you’re nauseated by the personalized precision of a Facebook ad.

Big data has been around for awhile, but our discomfort with it is relatively recent. The election of Donald Trump punctured many powerful fictions, among them the belief in the beneficence of the tech industry. There is now greater public awareness of how a handful of large companies use technology to monitor and manipulate us.

Source: theguardian.com
Author: Ben Tarnoff