Consumer Espionage & How Metadata is Used Against Us

The saying goes that there's no such thing as a free lunch - if you are not paying, usually it is because you are the product. Every day we interact with platforms to read articles, share thoughts, upload our posts, make purchases, conduct research or otherwise just leisurely scroll. These platforms often have required billions of dollars of investment and many years of hard work by the brightest minds to be developed, yet we pay nothing to use them. If you have ever thought this is too good of a deal to be true - you are correct. "Free" apps and services exploit our personal data, often without us fully realising the consequences on our privacy, autonomy and decision-making.Materials you might find helpful: Thompson, S.A. & Warzel, C., 2019. How Your Phone Betrays Democracy. The New York Times, 21 December. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/21/opinion/location-data-democracy-protests.html [Accessed 3 November 2024].Wylie, C., 2020. Mindfuck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. Paperback ed. London: Profile Books: BBC News, 2023. How WhatsApp became the 'app for everything' in Brazil. BBC News, 17 August. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j7nrppny2o [Accessed 3 November 2024].