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As part of an in-depth investigation into the role big data company Cambridge Analytica played in influencing the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the presidential elections in the United States, The Guardian’s Observer magazine has published the story of whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica that devised the behavioral analysis software used by the company says, "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons."
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One of the big drawbacks of data recorded by our culture is that it’s longevity relies on the robustness of the medium that it is encoded on: paper rots, magnetic sectors on hard drives fade, and the plastic and aluminum used in optical disks like DVDs eventually degrade and oxidize. The ancients had a penchant for setting things down in stone, a method of preserving information that seems to have worked quite well, but it’s a method that our culture doesn’t use very frequently. But what if we were to encode information in glass?
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Big Data—it means that everyone from the government to the average website can follow your every movement on the internet. Go to a website to look at a possible new car and the next thing you know, when you go to Facebook, car dealer ads are appearing on your page. Make an internet phone call, send an email—somebody’s watching, and profiting, from your activities. Send a G-Mail, and reader algorithms detect the content in order to send you ads. And then there’s the NSA, which seems to have its eyes everywhere.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You CAN regain your privacy. This weekend we detail some of the things you can do to regain what, just a few years ago, we regarded as an inalienable right—our privacy.
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