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see the full and complete path that your customers take to conversion, from seeing an ad on TV to searching on their smartphone to clicking on a display ad on their laptop,” a business called Converto boasted on its website in 2013.
    The online advertising industry argued that the ability to tailor ads that appeared on a screen to the presumed appetites of the person using the computer was the foundation of the free Internet: the advertising dollars supported sites that otherwise would have no sources of revenue.
    Whatever the merits of that argument, it was hard to defend the stealthiness of the commercial surveillance. No national law requires that this monitoring be disclosed, much less forbids it. A few halfheartedefforts by the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the monitoring have gone nowhere. There was no way for people to get their data back.
    Or even their thoughts.
    In mid-2013, two researchers published a paper entitled “Self Censorship on Facebook,” reporting that in a study of 3.9 million users, 71 percent did not post something that they started to write. That is, they changed their minds. While this might look like prudence, or discretion, or editing, the researchers—both working at Facebook—described it as “self-censorship” and wrote that such behavior was a matter of concern to social network sites. When this happens, they wrote, Facebook “loses value from the lack of content generation.”
    The company maintained that users are told that it collects not only information that is openly shared but also when you “view or otherwise interact with things.”That means, the company asserted, the right to collect the unpublished content itself. “Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users. Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior,” Jennifer Golbeck, the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, wrote in
Slate
.
    At every instant, the fluid dynamics of the web—the interactions, the observations, the predations—are logged by servers. That such repositories of the lightning streams of human consciousness existed was scarcely known and little understood. “Almost everyone on Planet Earth has never read a web server log,” Eben Moglen, the Columbia law professor said. “This is a great failing in our social education about technology. It’s equivalent to not showing children what happens if cars collide and people don’t wear seat belts.”
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    One day in the 1970s, a man named Douglas Engelbart was walking along a beachfront boardwalk in California when he spotted a group of skateboarders doing tricks.
    â€œYou see these kids skateboarding actually jumping into the air and the skateboard stays attached to their feet, and they spin around,land on the skateboard, and keep going,” Engelbart remembered many years later.
    For Engelbart, those skateboarders were a way to understand the unpredictability of technology. “I made them stop and do it for me six times, so I could see how they did it. It’s very complicated—shifting weight on their feet, and so on. You couldn’t give them the engineering and tell them to go out and do that. Fifteen years ago, who could have designed that? And that’s all we can say about computers.”
    A little-celebrated figure in modern history, Engelbart had spent decades thinking about how computers could be linked together to augment human intelligence, to solve problems of increasing complexity. At a gathering of technologists in 1968, he showed what could happen when computers talked to one another. For the occasion, he demonstrated a device that made it easier for the humans to interact with the computer. The device was called the mouse.The