1Seldom in the annals of technological history has a right been surrendered so willingly, and with so little comprehension of its worth.
2The trade, when stripped of its euphemisms, amounts to this: our intimacies, exchanged for trifles of convenience we scarcely remember requesting.
3Data brokers, those unremarked intermediaries of the digital economy, trade in dossiers so granular they border on the prophetic.
4That such surveillance should be conducted not by states but by corporations is a distinction increasingly bereft of practical meaning.
5Scarcely had the public digested one revelation of mass data collection when another, more audacious still, would supplant it in the headlines.
6The consent we proffer, buried beneath forty pages of deliberately soporific legalese, is consent in name only.
7Anonymisation, that oft-cited safeguard, has proven disquietingly reversible; re-identification requires but a handful of ostensibly innocuous data points.
8Nor is the harm confined to the individual, for aggregated profiles can be wielded to sway electorates and calcify existing prejudices.
9So thoroughly have these practices insinuated themselves into quotidian life that resistance is now construed as eccentricity.
10It is a peculiar species of complacency that mistakes the absence of immediate consequence for the absence of peril.
11Were privacy to vanish altogether, we might not notice its passing, having long since ceased to exercise the faculty it protected.
12The question posterity will pose is not how the technology outstripped us, but why we so readily acquiesced.