We’ve since learned that actors both foreign and domestic employed information operations, computational propaganda, and cyberattacks weaponizing our commercial media infrastructure. The question at hand is whether our democratic process can endure a hyper-personalized data-driven media and propaganda environment that our founders could never have imagined.

Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests; although evidence is emerging that its geo-targeted voter profiles with ideological modelling may have helped the Leave.EU campaign find voters with “authoritarian” leanings. Regardless, the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journalists and regulators can never examine hyper-targeted dark posts deployed in 2016 because Facebook did not preserve or release them for public review.

A futuristic vision of Big Brother out of control? No, it's already getting underway in China, where the government is developing the Social Credit System (SCS) to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance "trust" nationwide and to build a culture of "sincerity". As the policy states, "It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility."

Among the key themes emerging from 1,116 respondents' answers were:

+ Things will not improve because the Internet's growth and accelerating innovation are allowing more people and AI to create and instantly spread manipulative narratives.

+ Humans are, by nature, selfish, tribal, gullible convenience seekers who put the most trust in that which seems familiar.

+ In existing economic, political and social systems, the powerful corporate and government leaders most able to improve the information environment profit most when it is in turmoil.

+ The dwindling of common knowledge makes healthy debate difficult, destabilizes trust and divides the public; info-glut and the fading of news media are part of the problem.

+ A small segment of society will find, use and perhaps pay a premium for information from reliable sources, but outside of this group 'chaos will reign,' and a worsening digital divide will develop.

Turns out that there were billion-dollar fortunes to be made by exploiting the foggy relationship between the public and tech companies. We all knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, an insight memorably encapsulated in 2010 by a commenter to the website MetaFilter, as, “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” But, really, how can you tell? So much of what is happening between the public and Silicon Valley is out of view — algorithms written and controlled by wizards who are able to extract value from your identity in ways you could never do for yourself.

Once Mr. Brin, Mr. Page and Mr. Zuckerberg reversed course on pursuing profits, they reported an odd thing — the public didn’t seem to care. “Do you know the most common feedback, honestly?” Mr. Brin said in 2002 when asked about the reaction to Google’s embrace of advertising. “It’s ‘What ads?’ People either haven’t done searches that bring them up or haven’t noticed them. Or the third possibility is that they brought up the ads and they did notice them and they forgot about them, which I think is the most likely scenario.

Online advertising broke everything that worked in pre-online advertising (then broke everything else it touched too)

Unlike Russian efforts to secretly influence the 2016 election via social media, this American-led campaign was aided by direct collaboration with employees of Facebook and Google. They helped target the ads to more efficiently reach the intended audiences, according to internal reports from the ad agency that ran the campaign, as well as five people involved with the efforts.

Approximately 40 websites used special code that triggered an avalanche of fraudulent views of video ads from companies such as P&G, Unilever, Hershey’s, Johnson & Johnson, Ford, and MGM, according to data gathered by ad fraud investigation firm Social Puncher in collaboration with BuzzFeed News. Over 100 brands saw their ads fraudulently displayed on the sites, and roughly 50 brands appeared multiple times.

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that the CEO of an ad platform and digital marketing agency is an owner of 12 websites that earned revenue from the fraudulent views, and his company provided the ad platform used by sites in the scheme. Another key player is a former employee of a large ad network who runs a group of eight sites that were part of the fraud, and who consults for a company with another eight sites in it. That company is owned by a model and online entrepreneur who played Bob Saget’s girlfriend on the HBO show Entourage. A final site researchers identified in the scheme is owned by the cofounder of one of the 20 largest ad networks in the United States.

Putting this all together, as data science moves from math-heavy articles in obscure academic technical journals towards becoming a driving, if not dominate, force underlying much of our daily lives, the myriad daily decisions of researchers and programmers are impacting everything from the decisions of our courts to the safety of our cars to the filter bubbles that surround us and shape our understandings to the algorithm that decided whether this article appeared in your social media news feed. The people driving our big data world today tend to have backgrounds in areas like computer science, disciplines which emphasize answering questions, not asking them, whereas as a society perhaps the biggest question of all is just which questions we should be answering.

Public anonymity is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Coming soon to an airport in Dubai is an artsy, colorful video security and customs tunnel that scans your face, adds you to a database, indexes you with artificial intelligence and decides if you're free to leave -- or not.

By the end of summer 2018, Dubai International Airport's Terminal 3 will have replaced its security-clearance counter with a walkway tunnel filled with 80 face-scanning cameras disguised as a distracting immersive video.