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Right now other people are making lots of money on our data. So much money. I think the one that stands out for me is a company called Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel in 2003. It’s actually one of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories, and is worth more than Twitter. Most people have never heard of it because it’s all operating completely behind the scenes. This company and companies like it have databases that contain every possible thing you can ever imagine, on you, and who you are, and what you’re interested in. It’s got things like your declared sexuality as well as your true sexuality, things like whether you’ve had a miscarriage, whether you’ve had an abortion. Your feelings on guns, whether you’ve used drugs, like, all of these things are being packaged up, inferred, and sold on for huge profit.

Do we need to develop a brand-new intuition about how to interact with algorithms? It’s not on us to change that as the users. It’s on the people who are designing the algorithms to make their algorithms to fit into existing human intuition.