Reversing the earlier pattern in which the corporate sector relied on the state’s statistics, social quantification today is principally a capacity of the commercial sector, with states the dependent users. Only in this era did it become imaginable that a government might, as the United Kingdom did in 2013, float the idea of abolishing its census and relying instead on privately acquired data.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 386