None of us can hide the things we consume online, there is simply no such thing as privacy in this context.
The machine knows who we're going to vote for before we actually do it... the algorithm is that good. And merchants can mine that data to target their ads. It's terrifying to be honest, we won't allow a government to have this sort of power for a reason!
I have been saying, for decades now, not just years, that anyone who believes that privacy exists as our parents knew it is deluding themselves. And that's even not online, in the sense we've been discussing. A huge amount of "privacy by obscurity" and difficulty in getting to the places that held public records, and searching them, has been blown away in the digital age. My mother passed away recently, and in the last few weeks I have been doing a "deep dive" into Find A Grave (run by Ancestry.com) after the monument engravers used one of their images of the tombstone from Mom's family plot and sent it to me. The number of death certificates associated with the various memorials (as they dub each grave) is just astounding, and these are all scans of materials that predate, by many, many years, the birth of the internet. They have redacted the causes of death for infant deaths, but not for adult ones. You can learn quite a bit you didn't know just from a death certificate.
I have made reference in the past to a story (and a long, in-depth one) I heard on NPR several years ago with an expert on data mining and behavior prediction being the featured guest. Even she (I seem to remember it was a woman) said that the algorithms already exist that can, and most often do, predict, and very accurately predict, things about a given individual with just a few strategic data points about them, and the more data points available, the more spookily accurate the predictions become. The demonstration used was, to me, simultaneously fascinating and horrifying/chilling at the same time.
The very concept of privacy as I conceive of it in daily life really does not exist if these algorithms, and algorithms of proven reliability and validity, are used.
And, yes, the only thing more chilling than the idea that private enterprise is already doing it is that government could be, too, at the drop of a hat if they already are not doing so in secret. But all we can keep our eyes on, literally and figuratively, is what can be seen and do our best to prevent the very worst from happening. Whether we, the people, succeed or not is an entirely different question, and there are days when I believe we will and others where I believe, most assuredly, that we will not.
