From the Making Sense of the Digital Society lecture series.

Scholar and activist Shoshana Zuboff’s outlook on the future is grim. For her, governments need to outlaw the collection and selling of human data (data that captures internet users online behaviour) and the trade in these data to business consumers (advertising firms, etc.). Otherwise, she predicts that online users will be remotely controlled on a vast scale. Enough data in the “wrong” hands – she predicts – will make it possible to manage individuals as human systems, stripping them of their autonomy.