guys knew where he was twenty-four seven. It seemed so far-fetched and impossible. That was the first time we—the general public—got an inkling of how satellites watch your every move. How the government can keep tabs on you. It was startling. A real eye-opener. Of course, now it’s not just the government, but anyone, any time. Thanks to Snowden, we know it’s not just our paranoia.”
I pictured the text. The note. The Facebook banner. I was the “anyone.” I was the one being watched.
“A lot of stuff from movies has come true,” said Kate. “Things we take for granted now. I see that when I watch movies from the eighties and before. Even Star Trek.”
“Technology’s moving, like, crazy fast,” Dan joined in. “Faster than since the Industrial Revolution in Britain. But the masses aren’t psychologically prepared yet for stuff that’s already possible. Stuff that’s already been invented, already out there.”
Kate was rhythmically peeling potatoes. “It’s not that we aren’t ready, Dan, its ’cause they want to make more money, drip-feed us slowly with their crap. Milk the cash cow. Shove products in our faces we don’t need.”
“I know,” I chimed in. “Facebook, for instance. Have you noticed how many ads there are? How specific? How do they know how to target the right person? Is there some way they know where individuals live?”
“Course,” Dan said. “They know everything. How old you are. How much you earn. Your likes and dislikes. Where you live. What you buy. Your birthday. Why? ’Cause we’ve given them our data whether we meant to or not. It’s easy for them to nail down their target demographic.”
I filled a jug with water and ice and set it on the table. “Yes, but there’s no way they could target one individual with their ads,” I said.
“Course you can. All you have to do is create a custom audience with chosen email addresses. For the ad to serve, you need a list of, I think, at least thirty people. Let’s say you wanted to target just me. You could add twenty-nine email addresses from people in New York, and me—then when you go to choose your audience for your ad set, you’d target only people located in California. Since all the other email addresses would be New York, I’d be the only person seeing your ad. Ensure that you choose an age range which includes my age, gender, and you can also use geographic micro-targeting, just to be extra sure.”
My mind was spinning. Micro-targeting?
“Companies might want to target a specific address—a convention center, maybe,” Dan went on. “All businesses use targeted ads. Even with all the publicity around Facebook recently, people have no idea just how powerful these tools are. Of course in most cases it’s just about advertising, about selling products but as we know now politics has—”
“They love that people are sitting around Tweeting about the size of someone’s ass,” Jen interrupted, “or posting dumb selfies on Instagram or Snapchat so we get dumbed down. Then they can advertise shit to us that we don’t need. They’re doing their best to brainwash us so we forget about what’s really important, like—”
“Hey,” Kate said, “I do Snapchat, it’s fun.”
Jen gave Kate a withering look. “And the oil industry has a lot to answer for,” Jen went on, “and our governments that want to keep us going round and round in this vicious circle of fossil fuel consumption. Look at the Swiss man—the psychiatrist—who flew across the world in a solar plane without stopping even once! Zero emissions! That should be on the first page of every news headline. Governments should be sponsoring all this cool technology, not private individuals. But it isn’t in their interest to move forward, no, they want the status quo to stay right where it is. Keep having wars, keep selling armaments. It’s all about the dollar. So fucking shortsighted.”
Dan’s knowledge about Facebook ads startled me. There was no way he was behind the Click-Here-To-Learn-More banner, or he certainly wouldn’t be letting on he knew so much. But if he was so au fait with the ins and outs of how all this worked, who else knew? Was this stuff common knowledge? I guessed it was, and I was uninformed. These three weren’t your average young adults, but clued-up. Intelligent. Frighteningly so. I hadn’t had such animated discussion about things since Juan.
“You’re right, Jen,” said Dan, raking his hands through his thick mop of hair. “Take quantum computers, for instance. Google has a