When I was growing up in the 1980s, my parents would occasionally take my brother and me for a special treat: an evening spent browsing for software at a local computer store.
We would wander among the aisles of shiny, shrink-wrapped boxes, lobbying our parents to buy us games such as the geography spy mystery “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?,” which cost about $40 a pop.
Flash-forward nearly 30 years, and my own kids can’t believe I ever paid so much for a computer game. Most software packages—from games to productivity apps to health-tracking apps—are free.
There’s only one catch: We pay for all this software with a new currency, our personal data. Whenever we download an app, visit a website, watch a smart TV, use free WiFi, or partake of most of the joys of the information age, we agree to give up previously unimaginable amounts of personal data.
The shift toward data as currency began somewhat innocuously. At first, we simply accepted ads targeted to our search queries. But now, a decade later, the trade-offs have become more extreme. We implicitly agree to have our movements followed both virtually, as we browse the web, and physically, as our phones transmit our locations. We agree to have our interests cataloged and analyzed. We agree to have the content of our emails scanned. We agree to have our friends identified and analyzed in ‘‘social graphs.’’ We agree to have our images stored, shared, and tagged and our faces analyzed to help companies perfect their facial recognition tools. We agree to have our voices analyzed, our fingerprints scanned, and soon enough, the iris patterns of our eyes stored in vast, remote databases.
We would wander among the aisles of shiny, shrink-wrapped boxes, lobbying our parents to buy us games such as the geography spy mystery “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?,” which cost about $40 a pop.
Flash-forward nearly 30 years, and my own kids can’t believe I ever paid so much for a computer game. Most software packages—from games to productivity apps to health-tracking apps—are free.
There’s only one catch: We pay for all this software with a new currency, our personal data. Whenever we download an app, visit a website, watch a smart TV, use free WiFi, or partake of most of the joys of the information age, we agree to give up previously unimaginable amounts of personal data.
The shift toward data as currency began somewhat innocuously. At first, we simply accepted ads targeted to our search queries. But now, a decade later, the trade-offs have become more extreme. We implicitly agree to have our movements followed both virtually, as we browse the web, and physically, as our phones transmit our locations. We agree to have our interests cataloged and analyzed. We agree to have the content of our emails scanned. We agree to have our friends identified and analyzed in ‘‘social graphs.’’ We agree to have our images stored, shared, and tagged and our faces analyzed to help companies perfect their facial recognition tools. We agree to have our voices analyzed, our fingerprints scanned, and soon enough, the iris patterns of our eyes stored in vast, remote databases.
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