Qualms turn to disquiet when the fine print informs anyone who uses the site that their personal information may be passed on to the person/organization initiating the petition; further, it may also be shared with third parties, may be disclosed to authorities or other legal petitioners, and may even be sold under certain circumstances. In other words, perhaps unwittingly, Simon Johnson is exposing those who sign on to his petition to all the usual dangers of data aggregation, surveillance, and analysis familiar from the long history of high-volume for-profit direct mail operations. Johnson’s "protest" orchestrates the harvesting of information for private profit and political machinations, precipitating an asymmetry, weakening the movement in the name of symbolic action. Furthermore, although Jamie Dimon will never ever be ousted by any such petition, or similar symbolic political activity, thousands of people will enter their names into a database archiving the expressed hostility to the banksters, and someone, somewhere, is making a profit.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 911