Anne Toomey McKenna

And surveillance capitalism is just that.

You make money when you know information about people because you can target them so specifically.

The problem is that it's not the massive quantities of data that are collected about you aren't just from walking into stores.

I think it's important that we recognize what's being collected about you is often occurring through apps on your smartphones and your other devices.

And the software embedded in there is collecting just all kinds of data.

And that data is valuable, yes, to market things to you, but it's also invaluable for insurance companies.

Insurance companies want to know what's your health like, right?

Are you a more expensive risk to insurer?

Financial entities want to know all kinds of information about you because they're going to factor that into the rates that you're charged for, say, a credit card or even for, you know, a mortgage.

So you have all of these private...

entities that collect all of this data, much of it biometric data.

And all of that data gets aggregated and it gets put into what it becomes, what we call commercially available information.

And it ends up in a massive data market.

where data brokers are constantly buying and selling it.

Your data is money and it's worth a lot of money because it tells us so much.

I guess the underside that's a little more concerning and dangerous is that law enforcement can access that data by buying it.

And we have example after example

of data brokers and private companies having contractual relationships with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to sell that data.

So it's both your data is being collected to make money off of you so you can be targeted for advertising.

It's being collected so it can be sold to many players, but those players can include law enforcement.