It wasn’t the Internet that cost us our privacy. Long before that, it was credit cards and marketing. Marketing first.
Personal information became a commodity when it was understood that you could get more for your advertising dollars if you could target your audience—or even just narrow it a little bit. That happened a long time ago. TV ads, for instance, have long been targeted to the viewers most likely to be interested in their products. It didn’t even require a computer, but computers made it vastly easier to record, aggregate, correlate, and analyze data. How often do you see diaper commercials and skin care ads on shows with lots of shooting and car chases? What used to be advertised during Saturday morning cartoons all the way back in the 1950s? Not beer and shaving products.
Credit cards, survey data (“Fill out this simple questionnaire on your buying preferences and get three free coupons worth $1.50”) ( “And by the way, what’s your age, educational level, and household income? Give us your address so we can send you your coupons”), and other voluntarily and involuntarily surrendered information compromised our privacy long before people started posting their lives online and then complaining about feeling violated when people looked. It doesn’t even require hacking. The amount of information that people freely give away about themselves is and has long been simply amazing.
As long ago as 1977, I started trying to figure out how a child born into American society under what we considered normal conditions could be kept off the grid, and my research yielded no way.