Sometimes there is no consent to data relations at all, just brute necessity. One example is when people wear a sensor or tracker, on order of their employer, as they move around their work space. Another example is when, as in China's Xianjiang province in February 2017, the government banned petrol sales to anyone without GPS tracking installed in his or her car. The logical limit of consent is when—as is increasingly common in China today—paying for transactions or just walking around public space involves facial recognition by algorithmically enhanced tracking systems linked to national databases. The development of systems that manage these barely consensual relations is a growth area: the Beijing company Face ++ was valued at $1.5 billion before its latest fund-raising from the Chinese and Russian sovereign wealth funds.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 138