There is a strange asymmetry here. Anita Gurumurthy, head of Indian civil society organization IT for Change, writes that “as the citizen becomes more and more legible to the state, the state becomes more and more opaque to the citizen,” although we might add corporations to the state in that observation. When the goal of data extraction is the capitalization of human life, we should not be surprised that the resulting knowledges have at best an ambiguous public status.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 391