Our world revolves around data. We keep track of the number of steps we take on a daily basis. We record the books we read. We shop online. We follow the news, partake of social media, and perform searches for information as varied as there are people. All of these activities create bits of data that are exploited by companies and algorithms to influence what we view, how we vote, and even the way we live. Data has become an industry, with players like Google and Facebook, but also the U.S. government and countless entities attempting to understand everything about us. Whereas some hope to deliver better products and line their pockets, governments hope to prevent future terrorist acts like September 11, 2001.
Through it all, all of these players are losing sight that as they quantify and turn people into numbers, and as they understand us better than we understand ourselves, we all lose an element of privacy. Numerati, people who control numbers, have infiltrated businesses and governments to devise ever more sophisticated way to analyze and understand human beings, granulating data in such a way that one's preferences can be used to predict what we will do next. As the dawn of the data age turns into morning, the mathematical modeling of our behaviors continues unabated, for better, and for worse.
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