This essay appeared in the December 5, 2011, edition of the New Yorker.

1

This past Tuesday, Facebook made a deal with the F.T.C.: from now on, the social-networking company can no longer humbug us about privacy. If we’re told that something we post on the site will be private, it will stay that way, unless we give Facebook permission to make it public. Or at least sort of. For a while. Facebook has been relentless in its effort to make more of what it knows about us—the music we listen to, the photos we take, the friends we have—available to more people, and it will surely figure out creative ways, F.T.C. or no F.T.C., to further that campaign. The company’s leadership sincerely believes that the more we share the better the world will be. Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O., has said that in ten years we’ll share a thousand times as much as we do now. That seems to be both an observation and a goal.

2

Meanwhile, Zynga has announced that it’s going to raise about a billion dollars in an impending I.P.O. Zynga makes social games like FarmVille, in which people harvest and sell virtual tomatoes. The games sound inane to non-players, and Zynga employees claim that their workplace is run like a labor camp; yet the company is worth perhaps ten billion dollars. Why? Partly because they collect and analyze fifteen terabytes of data a day from their users. They watch carefully in order to learn how to hook people and what enticements to offer someone frustrated about his slow-growing tomato crop. (There’s a segment from Bloomberg West in which an analyst compares Zynga to a drug dealer.) According to Zynga’s recent S.E.C. filings, its total number of players is stagnant, but the amount of money it can extract from each one is growing. Data is the currency of the Web right now. Whoever has the most detailed data about you will get rich. Zynga has great data, and Zynga is about to get very rich.

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Last week also brought the news that a company called Carrier IQ has installed software on about a hundred and fifty million phones that lets it and its customers—such as Sprint, A.T. & T., and Apple—know an awful lot about you. It tracks location, stores the numbers you dial, and even records the Websites you browse when you’re not connected to a cell network. The point of the software is to help the phone companies improve their networks and serve you better. But this is done in a mysterious (and perhaps nefarious) way. Most people don’t know they have it, and it’s not easy to remove. It’s also not clear exactly what it’s recording, though a bevy of new lawsuits and government investigations will now try to figure that out. At the very least, there’s one more company that you’ve never heard of that knows a heck of a lot about you. “The excuse proffered thus far—improved service—is at best feeble when compared to the extent of the potential invasion of privacy,” Stephen Wicker, a professor in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, told me.

4

These are just three stories from the past seven days. There’ll surely be more soon. Together, they’ve made me think of something I’ll call The Exponential Law of Privacy Loss (or TELPL, pronounced “tell people”). The more we do online, the better companies get at tracking us, and the more accurate and detailed the data they glean from us becomes. The amount of data that they have grows exponentially over time.

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It’s impossible to exactly measure what percent of our time is spent connected to the Internet: texting, shopping, surfing, browsing, sleeping. But, my best estimation is that, a few years ago, we lived roughly ten percent of our lives online, and companies captured about ten percent of what we did. Now it’s about thirty percent, and the companies capture thirty percent of that—which means roughly nine times as much as a few years ago. Eventually, when we live seventy percent of our lives online, digital companies will capture and store about seventy percent of that. I’m not sure what will happen to the formula when we spend our entire lives online. Ideally, we won’t get there.

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This tracking isn’t all bad; it may not even be mostly bad. People keep letting Facebook broadcast more of their preferences and habits, and they love it. The more that advertisers know about you, the more willing they are to do things like buy advertisements on Websites, supporting journalism such as this. Carrier IQ makes our phones more efficient, and I have yet to hear of any specific harm done to any specific person by their system. Still, the Law is real. The F.T.C. can slow things down, but only a little. All of us are still becoming corporate data at an ever faster rate, for better and for worse.