Uninformed Consent

Three years ago the satirical website The Onion ran an article with the headline “Woman Stalked Across 8 Websites by Obsessed Shoe Advertisement.” Everywhere she went online, this fictional consumer saw the same ad. “The creepiest part,” she says in the story, “is that it even seems to know my shoe size.” The piece poked fun at an increasingly common — if clumsy — digital marketing technique. But today its gentle humor seems almost quaint. Technology has advanced far beyond the browser cookies and retargeting that allow ads to follow us around the internet. Smartphones now track our physical location and proximity to other people — and, as researchers recently discovered, can even do so when we turn off location services. We can disable the tracking on our web browsers, but our digital fingerprints can still be connected across devices, enabling our identities to be sleuthed out. Home assistants like Alexa listen to our conversations and, when activated, record what we’re saying. A growing range of everyday things — from Barbie dolls to medical devices — connect to the internet and transmit information about our movements, our behavior, our preferences, and even our health. A dominant web business model today is to amass as much data on individuals as possible and then use it or sell it — to target or persuade, reward or penalize. The internet has become a surveillance economy.