Edition 015: The Choice Was Made For You

The thing the corporation is taking is not just your human data… It is your ability to choose what happens next… By the time you are choosing, the choice has already been made smaller by a system you cannot see… There is no federal law requiring data brokers to tell you they have your file. You have no right to see it, correct it, delete it, or opt out of its sale… agencies that would need a warrant to get the same information directly… can purchase it from data brokers instead… This is what the loss of autonomy looks like. It's not a dramatic moment in which something is taken from you. It is a quiet narrowing of the world that reaches you… The corporations are not pumping your data to store it. They are extracting it to build a model of you, precise, predictive, and constantly updated, that gives the corporation an information advantage over you in every transaction you will ever conduct with it.