What we choose to share

One thing that often gets missed in debates around the internet, particularly now that governments are locking everything away behind an age-verification wall is how our relationship to the internet has changed. In the early days, our computers were relatively benign. They didn’t know anything about us besides what we chose to share. Even though most people were running some form of Windows back in the mid-90s, Microsoft had yet to turn its flagship product into an ad-delivery platform that occasionally launched programs of your choosing. That wouldn’t start in earnest until much later. Fast forward to today and Windows 11 could by most metrics be considered malware. The amount of information being collected by our devices is genuinely frightening. Now the websites we visit or the apps we use on our phones collect enough data from us to know how we like our toast buttered in the mornings. The worst part is, we’re often not choosing to share this information. It is collected routinely…