Data and privacy

 First up, a trip to the grocery store. You hop in your car, blissfully unaware that doing so results in numerification—the assignment of numbers to complex human acts. There’s an entire industry, projected to be worth half a trillion dollars by 2030, dedicated to collecting and selling the trails of data your car emits when it hits the road. Everything is tracked. Your location and speed. Your acceleration and braking patterns. The music you listen to along the way. Who you call from your car and for how long you speak. Many cars today produce around twenty-five gigabytes of data per hour. That’s roughly the size of all English-language Wikipedia articles—every hour.

Ruled by Numbers