The goose that laid the golden eggs: personal data and the Internet of Things

摘要

Since the UK's vote on Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, the world has become increasingly agitated about the power and potential for abuse implicit in the vast global utilities Google, Facebook and Amazon. We are still now only beginning to see a dim outline of the ways in which access to the behaviors and perceptions of billions of consumers worldwide can be used for shadowy purposes by targeting messages - both factual and fictional - to inflame and to terrorize. In response, public institutions such as the EU and the US Congress have been taking increasingly harsh tones with these quasi-monopolies, including, in the case of the EU, a series of ever-increasing financial penalties (White, 2018).