We woke up one day and realized our phones knew we were pregnant before our parents did. Or maybe you noticed that a private conversation about a specific brand of cat food—held entirely offline—resulted in a targeted ad thirty seconds later. It feels like a betrayal. People often ask, "What did they do to us?" when they realize the sheer scale of the digital dragnet we live inside. We aren't just talking about a few cookies or a login history. We are talking about the systematic commodification of human behavior.
It happened slowly. Then it happened all at once.
In the early 2000s, the internet felt like a playground. You had forums, chat rooms, and the occasional banner ad for a screensaver. But the tech giants—the ones we now call Big Tech—discovered something lucrative. They realized that the "waste" data produced by our searches and clicks wasn't actually waste. It was a goldmine. Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor at Harvard Business School, famously coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" to describe this. She argues that these companies took our private experiences and turned them into raw material for translation into behavioral data.
The Architecture of the Grab
When people ask what did they do to us, they are usually looking for a culprit. But there isn't just one. It’s an ecosystem.
Take the concept of "shadow profiles." Even if you never signed up for a specific social media platform, that platform likely has a folder on you. How? Because your friends uploaded their contacts. Your data was scraped from third-party sites. You were tracked via "Like" buttons embedded on websites that have nothing to do with social media.
Think about the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018. That was a watershed moment. It wasn't just about ads; it was about psychographic profiling. They used a simple personality quiz to harvest data from 87 million people. They mapped out fears, triggers, and political leanings. They didn't just watch us; they tried to nudge us. This is the core of the "what did they do to us" sentiment: the feeling that our autonomy has been quietly eroded by algorithms designed to keep us scrolling.
The Myth of "Opting Out"
You can’t really leave. Not easily.
Modern life requires a digital footprint. Try getting a job, a bank account, or an apartment without an email address or a smartphone. The infrastructure of our society is built on these tools. We traded privacy for convenience. Honestly, most of us did it willingly because the "free" services were too good to pass up. Google Maps is a miracle of engineering. But the cost is your location history, down to the meter, stored for years.
The Psychological Toll of the Algorithm
We have to talk about the brain.
The engineers at companies like Facebook and Pinterest didn't just build websites; they built "dopamine loops." Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, admitted as much years ago. He said the thought process behind building these applications was: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"
They gave us a little dopamine hit every time someone liked a photo or replied to a post. This isn't an accident. It’s "persuasive technology." When we ask what did they do to us, we are often talking about our shortened attention spans and the constant itch to check a device. We’ve been conditioned.
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Data Brokering: The Invisible Middlemen
While we focus on the big names like Apple or Amazon, the real "what did they do to us" happens in the shadows with data brokers. Companies like Acxiom or Epsilon. You’ve probably never heard of them, yet they likely have thousands of data points on you. They know your credit score, your health concerns, your favorite cereal, and your political affiliation. They buy this data from grocery store loyalty programs and weather apps.
They sell it to insurance companies. They sell it to marketers. Sometimes, they sell it to bad actors.
- Financial Impact: Your data determines the price of your car insurance.
- Employment: Algorithms screen resumes before a human ever sees them.
- Housing: Targeted ads can inadvertently (or purposefully) exclude certain demographics from seeing rental opportunities.
Is Privacy Actually Dead?
It's a grim picture. But "dead" is a strong word.
Regulations are trying to catch up. The GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California were the first real shots fired in the war to take back our data. They forced companies to at least tell us what they were doing. They gave us the "Right to be Forgotten." But let's be real: clicking "Accept All" on a cookie banner isn't true consent. It's fatigue.
We also see a shift in the market. Apple started marketing privacy as a luxury feature. When they introduced "App Tracking Transparency" in iOS 14.5, it cost Meta (Facebook) billions of dollars in revenue. Why? Because when given the choice, most people said, "No, don't track me."
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This proves that the "what did they do to us" question has a clear answer: they took what we didn't know we were giving away. Now that we know, we want it back.
How to Reclaim Your Digital Self
You aren't going to disappear from the internet. That's impossible for 99% of people. But you can minimize the damage. The goal isn't total invisibility; it's digital hygiene.
First, look at your permissions. Most apps do not need access to your microphone or your contacts. If a flashlight app wants to know your location, delete it.
Switch your search engine. Google is a data vacuum. Options like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search don't track your queries. It feels weird for the first three days, then you don't even notice the difference.
Audit your "Log in with Facebook/Google" habits. Every time you use those buttons to join a new site, you are linking your identity across the web. It's better to use a dedicated password manager and create unique, siloed accounts.
Tangible Steps for Today
- Check your Google My Activity page. It’s eye-opening. You can see every voice recording, every search, and every place you’ve been. Use the auto-delete settings to wipe data every 3 months.
- Use a VPN. Not just for bypassing Netflix geo-blocks, but to hide your IP address from your ISP. Your Internet Service Provider sees everything you do unless you encrypt that tunnel.
- Physical blockers. A simple piece of tape over your webcam or a "data blocker" (USB condom) when charging in public ports can prevent hardware-level intrusions.
- Privacy-focused browsers. Move away from Chrome. Firefox is a solid, non-profit alternative that allows for heavy-duty privacy extensions like uBlock Origin.
What they did to us was transform our identities into a commodity. They built a world where "free" actually means "you are the product." But the narrative is changing. By understanding the history of this data heist, we can start setting boundaries. It starts with the realization that your attention is the most valuable thing you own. Stop giving it away for free.
Protecting yourself isn't about being paranoid; it's about being a conscious citizen in a digital age. Start by deleting one unused app today. Turn off "Background App Refresh" for everything except the essentials. These small frictions make you a harder target for the algorithms.