Today's environment of data collection and processing far exceeds in complexity, continuity, and depth the single violations that were once understood to threaten a subject's privacy. If data colonialism works through an "ecology" of data collection, as the social quantification sector consistently tells us it does, then any response must be environmental too. Driven by private corporations much more than by states, today's "autonomic smart environments," as Dutch legal theorist Mireille Hildebrandt calls them, are saturated with automated agents that have the power to shape the contexts in which human agents can make choices. So pervasive is this shaping and so unpredictable to human beings are its outcomes that the social environment stops being formed through mutual expectations between people and becomes driven exclusively by the goals of datadriven manipulation. This unsettles the individual freedom of choice that is core to all liberal notions of privacy.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 560