The Age Of Privacy Is Over

Most people wouldn’t have even considered it an “age,” but according to this rather sour article in the Atlantic, it was one and now it’s over. But don’t make the likes of Google and Facebook into scapegoats, says writer Ian Bogost. “Online services are only accelerating the reach and impact of data-intelligence practices that stretch back decades,” he says. His short history traces it back all the way to the 17th century, when merchants and bankers began learning how to benefit from what was later given the name “business intelligence.” In the late 1960s, a breakthrough came with the development of relational databases, which were soon refined, collated and sold by, among other players, the so-called credit reporting bureaus, which became essentially “one wellspring, selling access to such information for almost any purpose, including marketing.” Today, the author says, various online services “have collected your personal data, with and without your permission, from employers, public records, purchases, banking activity, educational history, and hundreds more sources. They have connected it, recombined it, bought it, and sold it … and it’s not going to stop.”