“Like a pusher holding that first dime bag of heroin over a soon-to-be junkie, Google gave you something 'on the house,’ and only later might you realize the implications of the bargain you were making.” “Viewed with a skeptical eye, Google creates products not to give you free e-mail, but to get more data out of you,” writes Goodman.

Your interests represent the monetization of all this hardware that has turned into software delivery means, which itself exists to spy on you. Who are your friends? Do they have debt? What do you buy? What do they buy? Where do you go? What will you need there? This is essentially the business model of Google, of course, and when Goodman talks of the behemoth’s “free” products, he puts the word free in quotation marks. It is indeed a perverse brand of speculation. The data that are being obsessively collected, largely against our will, are tabulations of our potential to consume, and in the cannibalistic system Goodman documents, this itself is consumable. These demoralizing, if not dehumanizing encroachments are the result, more or less, of the transformation of citizens from consumers to consumed.

These entities justify this through sneaky changes to their terms of service, which are like contracts they rewrite behind your backs. Alongside the precedent set by that command center for terrorists and that nearly fatal Google search (the banker in fact got out), Goodman also traces mass transactions that dehumanize citizens largely through endless encroachments on privacy: the social media sites that steal and sell your data and grant themselves rights to keep it forever.

Future Crimes by Marc Goodman