The marketing ideology of personalization makes such tracking and surveillance seem attractive. Who after all would not want a service more geared to his or her particular wants and needs? The argument, very simply, is that personally targeted messages require prior information that can come only from . . . targeted surveillance! Yet evangelists for data-driven personalization still feel the need to defend this ideology aggressively, as when Acxiom, in a 2015 opinion survey, characterized acceptance of continuous data collection as “pragmatist” (fair enough) and opposition to it as “fundamentalist” (itself rather an extremist statement).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 97