Chinese users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see. Chinese users are assigned a “character” score, whereas the US government urges the tech companies to train their algorithms for a “radicalism” score. Indeed, the work of the shadow text is to evaluate, categorize, and predict our behavior in millions of ways that we can neither know nor combat—these are our digital dossiers. When it comes to credit scoring, US and UK banks and financial services firms have floated business models based on the mining and analysis of social media data for credit scores. Facebook itself has hinted of its interest, even filing a patent. These efforts receded only because the Federal Trade Commission threatened regulatory intervention.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1252