With the increased digitization of our lives, so many interactions of our everyday lives have become traceable than not. An interaction or conversation on the internet can feel private, especially in chatrooms, password-protected spaces, and personal websites, but I feel unnerved when I think that this privacy is only conditional and can easily / quickly be made public outside of my control. It’s become a habit for me to make information accessible online when I want it to be “public” and ask to have a conversation offline when I want it to be “private”.
In Radical Technologies’s chapter on Digitized Lives, they mentioned stacking as a commonly used method by tech giants to maintain control over every stage of the production, wrapping the variety of services, products, and devices we use under the umbrella of one power. With one company attempting to obtain ownership over many different aspects of our everyday life, they have a lot of variety in access to our data. In this one, what feels private is not private all, with all these invisible hands observing our data and customizing what they show us on our behalf.