The Oil of the Digital Age

[Commentary] A Michael Rigley video called “Network” recently caught our eye. A caption describing the video reads, “Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.” For policy wonks like us, this generally translates into one word: privacy. For a country seemingly obsessed with reality television and tabloid journalism, the United States is suddenly very worried about privacy, wrote The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky in the Washington Post. And not celebrity privacy, but your privacy. Joshua Brustein wrote in the New York Times that Facebook’s pending initial public offering gives credence to the argument that personal data is the oil of the digital age. The company was built on a formula common to the technology industry: offer people a service, collect information about them as they use that service and use that information to sell advertising. That information – and that advertising – is becoming more and more targeted, too.