PC Magazine - USA (2020-05)

But there’s more than one reason to be concerned about letting our personal
data be sucked up by tech companies. There are many ways the wholesale
gathering of data is being abused or could be abused, from blackmail to targeted
harassment to political lies and election meddling. It reinforces monopolies and
has led to discrimination and exclusion, according to a 2020 report from the
Norwegian Consumer Council. At its worst, it disrupts the integrity of the
democratic process (more on this later).

Increasingly, private data collection is described in terms of human rights—your
thoughts and opinions and ideas are your own, and so is any data that describes
them. Therefore, collection of it without your consent is theft. There’s also the
security of all this data and the risk to consumers (and the general public) when
a company slips up and some entity—hackers, Russia, China—gets access to it.

“You’ve certainly had a lot of political chaos in the US and elsewhere, coinciding
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attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If so many people weren’t
getting the majority of their information about the world from Facebook, then
Facebook’s policies about political advertising (or most anything else) wouldn’t
feel like life and death.”

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Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar, which would require online
political ads to carry information about who paid for them and who they
targeted, similar to how political advertising works on TV and radio. This was in
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