“Your habits are all geared to protecting privacy against the government because that was always the traditional threat. That is no longer the pattern, it is the private sector … we are going through a cultural adjustment.”

Americans are obsessed with the government poking into their individual affairs, their records, correspondence, finances, etc. This goes back to the earliest days of the Republic and led directly to the 4th Amendment. Otherwise, “privacy” isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution, I doubt if it really existed as a philosophical concept in the 18th century. What was really of concern to the founders was that the US Government, like the Crown before it, would know how much wealth they had and try to tax it. They had their stash, and they weren’t about to share it with a bunch of aristocrats. This obsession meant a great deal to the Gentlemen of Property who had a lot to lose. To the average American colonial, who owned little property and had minimal accumulated wealth, this was irrelevant.

Today, the average American has his mortgage, a salary and a little money in the bank, and the technology and administrative machinery to tax this is available. And of course, the average American likes to think of himself as a Gentleman of Property (or at least, one in training), and not just a wage slave. Suddenly, privacy is a big deal, and the government is the big villain. We have been trained quite effectively.

But the real threat today is what Robert calls “surveillance capitalism”, the corporate surveillance state, and it is the private sector that is rapidly developing the technology and databases (through the internet) to track our every commercial transaction, all our buying and earning and borrowing habits, and use that information against us for their benefit, both at the demographic and personal level, all neatly cross-referenced and tabulated.

The free market is about the only ally the common man has, but if you can monitor his consumer behavior you can devise a tailor made plan to get around those natural market safeguards, like anonymity and privacy. When the average man has his economic activity routinely monitored and logged, he doesn’t have a bloody chance. The marketeers knows a lot more about him than he knows about them.

Personally, I could care less if the government knows how much money I make, or have saved up, or how much I owe. They already have that information anyway. What really scares me is that the private sector now has the ability to learn those things about me and devise a fully automated personalized marketing plan targeted at my consumer behavior and spending habits. Of course, I never thought of myself as a Gentleman of Property. I just work here.