I was born in 1961, so a little more than half of my life was pre-internet (for me, the internet really began in 1995, when a new piece of software called Netscape was introduced). I remember how amazing email was before spammers got going, how fun the early “world-wide web” was, and how interesting and informative various bloggers were before Facebook, Twitter, and Google showed up and took over. There weren’t adblockers in the late 90s, because there weren’t many ads. I remember how furious we websurfers got when it was revealed that websites had these things called “cookies” that were sent to your browser, so they could track your history. What an invasion of privacy!

Those concerns seem quaint now. My daughter was born in 1994, and she has really not known any time when she couldn’t go online. She also knows that she has no privacy, and she goes on the internet with the expectation that everything she emails, posts on social media, and buys is seen and logged by someone or something. McKenzie Funk’s book, The Hank Show, is a biography of the man he holds responsible for first exploiting the financial potential of Big Data.

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