We’ve been having the wrong conversation about privacy for years now.
When people talk about online privacy, they invoke images of shadowy government agencies or Big Tech corporations poring over our data, obsessing over our mundane daily activities. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: nobody really cares about what brand of toothpaste you use, what car you drive, or even how much weight you lost in the last six months.
I don’t think Western governments are actually spying on their citizens in the way we typically imagine. I don’t think Big Tech executives are sitting in dark rooms, fascinated by your shopping habits. The surveillance narrative, while compelling, misses the actual mechanism of control at play.
The Real Game
All of this information—your clicks, your scrolls, your pauses, your purchases—isn’t being collected to watch you. It’s being collected to feed you.
Your data is used to create your information diet. It determines what restaurant recommendation appears next in your feed. It shapes which news articles you see, which voices you hear, which ideas feel mainstream or fringe. Most importantly, it influences what ideologies you will embrace next.
These days, it’s most obvious when you log into Twitter. The algorithmic timeline has become so transparently manipulative that you can almost feel the puppet strings. But make no mistake: it’s pretty much everywhere in the digital space. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, even your news aggregator—they’re all carefully curating what enters your consciousness.
Mind Control Over Surveillance
This is why privacy matters, but not in the way we’ve been conditioned to think.
The concern isn’t that someone is watching you. The concern is that someone is programming you. They’re not interested in knowing your secrets; they’re interested in shaping your thoughts, your beliefs, your behaviors.
You don’t need to spy on people when you can control what they see, what they think is important, what they believe is true, and what they feel compelled to do. Traditional surveillance is expensive and labor-intensive. But algorithmic curation? That scales infinitely, operates 24/7, and gets more effective the more data it has.
The Information Diet
Just as we’ve learned to be conscious of what we eat physically, we need to become conscious of what we consume mentally. But the difference is stark: you can read the ingredients on a food label. You can’t see the algorithmic recipe that determined why this particular post appeared in your feed right now.
The algorithm knows what makes you angry, what makes you engage, what keeps you scrolling. And it will serve you exactly that—not because it has malicious intent, but because engagement is the metric it’s optimized for.
This is the privacy crisis of our time: not the collection of data, but the weaponization of that data to shape human attention, thought, and ultimately, behavior.
What Now?
Understanding this shift—from surveillance to manipulation—changes how we should think about privacy protections. We need transparency not just in what data is collected, but in how it’s used to curate our reality. We need to reclaim agency over our information diet.
Because in the end, who needs spying when you have mind control?