One of the reasons data collection and user profiling have scaled so dramaticaly is that the underlying system is so difficult to see.
Historically, online surveillance was forensic. Something happened, and investigators had to find out:
Who posted this?
Who visited this place?
Who searched for this information?
Who is connected to this account?
As the pipeline between ad-tech corporations like Google, data brokers, commercial contractors like Palantir, and government agencies gets shorter, that starts looking like continuous, real-time access to what the public is doing online.
The infrastructure built across the web over the last two decades allows these questions to be asked continuously and answered in real time, reporting to third party buyers:
"A person at this location just searched for this."
"This device visited these websites."
"This account posted about this subject."
"These people appear to be connected."
Surveillance no longer has to begin with a known person, event, or crime. The system watches continuously, sorts people into categories, detects patterns, and surfaces whoever matches the criteria afterward.
The folks at Tech Policy Press sat down for a great conversation the other day about this architecture, demystifying how DHS is using its newly minted $170 Billion budget to pursue deporting one million people every year.
The harder the pipeline is to see, the easier it is to treat each step as harmless -- an ad tracker, a data broker, cookies, ISP tracking, analytics contracts, email scraping -- but together, they form a system in which ordinary marketing data is synonymous with continuous government surveillance.
#privacy #surveillance #adtech #Palantir