In 2015 an eight-year-old startup named Realeyes won a 3.6 million euro grant from the European Commission for a project code-named “SEWA: Automatic Sentiment Analysis in the Wild.” The aim was “to develop automated technology that will be able to read a person’s emotion when they view content and then establish how this relates to how much they liked the content.” The director of video at AOL International called the project “a huge leap forward in video ad tech” and “the Holy Grail of video marketing.” Just a year later, Realeyes won the commission’s Horizon 2020 innovation prize thanks to its “machine learning-based tools that help market researchers analyze the impact of their advertising and make it more relevant.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 878