As compelling as that Apple ad is, the Peeping Tom narrative doesn’t capture the collective dimension of data privacy. The truth, as the tech analyst Ben Thompson points out, is that the companies that track our every move, or try to, generally don’t care about us as individuals. The data they gather is aggregated, fed to machine learning algorithms, and used to target advertisements to us based on our behavior. There is no human being snooping through your laundry, just a machine trying to sell you more stuff. “The entire reason their businesses are possible is precisely because …
