When they gather all of this data, the purpose of it is to create a high resolution avatar of each and every human being. It doesn't matter whether you use their systems or not. They collect it on absolutely everybody. The concept of voodoo in the Caribbean was essentially this notion that you create a doll, an avatar, and that you can poke it with a pin and the person would experience that pain, so it becomes literally a representation of the human being.
My partner, Tristan Harris, came up with this notion of the voodoo doll to describe what's going on here, because what happens is that, before long, you get to this point where you can anticipate what people are going to be able to do. Because of the resolution of the voodoo doll and the context of all the other voodoo dolls you have, you can see what people who have common characteristics have done and it tells you what this person is going to do.
Shoshana makes the core point that, at the beginning, it's about trying to anticipate, but ultimately, in the final analysis, it is about actually manipulating behaviour, and the way you do this is by controlling the menu.
We as consumers think that Google is an honest broker, that Facebook is an honest broker and that the results of our queries are honest, but they're not. They are informed by the data voodoo doll, and as a consequence they are manipulating our behaviour because they manipulate the choices that are available to us.
Just as with a voodoo doll in the Caribbean, you are not aware of it. You're just aware that the outcome has happened without understanding what the source of it was. I think that is just wrong. As policy-makers and as somebody who spent 35 years in Silicon Valley, it's our job to come to the defence of our constituents.