Georgetown Law
Technology Review

Privacy and surveillance scholars increasingly worry that data collectors can use the information they gather about our behaviors,1For example, Tal Zarsky offers an early discussion of the problem in Online Privacy, Tailoring, and Persuasion, in Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation (Katherine J. Strandburg & Daniela Stan Raicu eds., 2006). Frank Pasquale points to it throughout his book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015). Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius provides a helpful treatment of manipulation questions, especially as they relate to European privacy law in Improving Privacy Protection in the Area of Behavioural Targeting (2015). The most far-reaching treatment is Ryan Calo’s discussion of “digital market manipulation” and consumer protection law in Digital Market Manipulation, 82 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 995 (2014). preferences, interests, incomes, and so on to manipulate us. Consider: investigative journalists recently discovered that Facebook allows advertisers to target vulnerable teenagers at moments when they feel “worthless” and “insecure.”2Sam Machkovech, Facebook Helped Advertisers Target Teens Who Feel “Worthless,“ Ars Technica (May 1, 2017), https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/ [https://perma.cc/BPD9-6NKP]. “Sharing economy” firms like the ride-hailing company Uber have explored ways to influence not only the behavior of their customers but also that of their drivers, raising concerns about potential manipulation in the workplace.3See generally Ryan Calo & Alex Rosenblat, The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power, 117 Colum. L. Rev.1623 (2017). And recent elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere have raised questions about the use of similar techniques to manipulate democratic political processes.4See generally Zeynep Tufekci, Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance, and Computational Politics, 19 First Monday 7 (July 7, 2014), https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097 (charting the questions of manipulating democratic political processes) [https://perma.cc/4XVR-KRKL].

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