Member-only story
The Battle for Your Digital Soul
The fight for privacy is a fight for freedom
Your digital soul is distributed among thousands of humming servers in air-conditioned rooms.
Virtually everything you do online is recorded somewhere. It’s valuable stuff, and it often changes hands for money.
We exchange pieces of our digital soul for convenience. We want to easily stay in touch, we want to network, to see the latest pictures of our grandchildren, we want to look at pictures of dogs. But convenience becomes a cage built piece by piece.
We accepted the cost of convenience for a long time. We thought, “so what if Facebook knows a thing or two about me? I’ll get adverts that are more tailored. That’s no bad thing.”
But in all that time, social media companies have built vast datasets. They swallowed up rival companies, they bought and sold information about users from third party companies, they tracked where you are and when.
All that data gets aggregated. A hack in 2018 compromised some 50 million Facebook accounts, giving hackers access not only to all those people’s Facebook accounts but also third party services connected to those Facebook accounts such as Airbnb, Spotify and Tinder.
