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logged, bundled, sorted, and sold to marketers. Together, they amount to nothing less than a full-psyche scan, unobstructed by law or social mores.
    â€œFacebook holds and controls more data about the daily lives and social interactions of half a billion people than 20th-century totalitarian governments ever managed to collect about the people they surveilled,” Eben Moglen, a technologist, historian, and professor of law at Columbia University, observed in 2010.
    That shirtless, drunken picture? The angry note to a lover, the careless words about a friend, the so-called private messages? Facebook has them all. And its marketers know when it is time to pop an advertisement for a florist who can deliver make-up flowers, or for a private investigator.
    Students at MIT figured out the identities of closeted gay people by studying what seemed like neutral information disclosed on Facebook.At the headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg was said to amuse himself with predictions on which Facebook “friends” would eventually hook up by watching how often someone was checking a friend’s profile, and the kinds of messages they were sending.
    The uproar over Facebook’s privacy policies obscured intrusions on an even grander scale by other powerful forces in society. Everyone had heard of AOL and Microsoft; few were familiar with their subsidiaries.Atlas Solutions, purchased by Microsoft in 2007, told businesses that it deploys “tracking pixels”—a kind of spy cookie that cannot be detected by most filters—to follow Internet users as they look at billions of web pages per month. These invisible bugs watch as we move across the web, shopping, reading, writing. Our habits are recorded. The pixels live in computer caches for months, waiting to be pulsed. Facebook bought Atlas in 2013, helping it track users when they left the site.
    And virtually unknown to users, AOL’s biggest business was never the cheery voice announcing, “You’ve got mail”; it was the billions of data items its subsidiary, Platform A, mined from Internet users, linking their interests and purchases, zip codes and significant others. The data wasstored on servers physically located in giant warehouses near Manassas, Virginia. AOL boasted that it followed “consumer behavior across thousands of websites.”
    Facebook was a proxy in a still larger struggle for control over what used to be the marrow of human identity: what we reveal and what we conceal, what we read and what we want. Just as human tissue is inhabited by trillions of bacteria, so, too, our online life is heavily colonized by external forces, invisible bits of code that silently log our desires and interests, and, at times, manipulate them.
    An experiment conducted in 2010 by the
Wall Street Journal
showed how far commercial interests could penetrate personal information, unbeknownst to web users. As part of a remarkable series called “What They Know,” the
Journal
team set up a “clean” computer with a browser that had not previously been used for surfing. The results: after visiting the fifty most popular websites in the United States, the reporters found that 131 different advertising companies had planted 2,224 tiny files on the computer. These files, essentially invisible, kept track of sites the users visited. This allowed the companies to develop profiles that included age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status, health worries, purchases, favorite TV shows, and movies. Deleting the tracking files did not eliminate them: some of them simply respawned.
    Handling all the data they collected was possible because computing power continued to double every eighteen months to two years, the rate predicted in 1965 by the technologist Gordon Moore. Cheap and prolific by 2010, that power enabled the creation of bare-bones start-ups and the granular monitoring of personal habits. “We can uniquely