With the advent of the internet, we as consumers are increasingly resigned to giving up fundamental aspects of our privacy in exchange for greater convenience when using our phones and computers. We have almost seemed to have grudgingly accepted the fact that being monitored by corporations and even governments is just a fact of modern life.

Many of us also believe that, since we aren't doing anything "wrong", or "illegal", we have "nothing to hide" and that we should not be afraid of authority figures gathering our data. However, do we really know what our data is harnessed for, and how the invasion of our privacy is affecting our lives? More often than not, corporations collect and sell our browsing data and analyze this data to influence our buying habits and patterns through targetted advertising or even our mindsets and cognitive behaviors. For instance, during the 2016 US Presidential Elections, Cambridge Analytica, a British Consulting firm, acquired the private data of 87 million Facebook users, in order to sell psychological profiles of American voters to political campaigns.

We are currently living in a world of low government effectiveness, a legislative system that is unable to keep up with the current state of technology, and a Neo-liberal, Capitalistic society that believes in the idea that companies should be free to do whatever they want in order to maximize profits, with a little nod to morality. Our data is being harnessed, our behaviors are being swayed, in the most insidious and ubiquitous ways possible.