Does Big Data Already Own You?

Dear Reader,

Nothing in this world is free, right?

That timeless adage rings true for most people past the age of 50, who lived out their formative years before the internet emerged, but for the younger generations it seems to be slightly dated these days.

The internet appears to fly in the face of this concept, as just about everything you see online can be used or experienced without paying a dime.

News articles… stock ticker updates… social media… All of it is offered to you from dozens of different sources and in dozens of formats, all for the price of nothing more than email address and perhaps a bit of personal data.

Feeling like unleashing rhetorical blitzkrieg upon your ideological rivals via Twitter? Go right ahead. It's 100% free of charge.

Want to share your latest travel plans on Facebook in hopes of making your friends, or fake friends, or social rivals jealous? Again, zero cost to you.

Just sign up, build a profile, and you can post your content until your fingers bleed.

What if all you want is a decent, reliable, easy-to-use email service provider? You've got more options than you can count, with industry giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) leading the way.

They'll even give you free storage big enough to keep 50,000 read and unread messages lying around, satisfying the anxieties of your inner digital hoarder.

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Here's the thing though, it's not free. Not free at all. You just have to look at the transaction and the parties involved in a different light and it all becomes clear.

Don't think of yourself as the client or the customer. Think of yourself as the asset being bought and sold.

The vendor is the social media platform. The buyer is a company trying to advertise its goods.

You are the product.

That old adage that younger people think is some old, tired vestige of capitalism is as true as ever and as consistent as ever.

If you run into a "free service" on the internet, then you are what's being sold.

And as a sellable good, you aren't cheap, either. According to various market studies, the information behind your average American Facebook profile — your social DNA, if you will — is worth something on the order of $6,000 per year.

That is your valuation, on average, in the eyes of companies exploiting your online presence.

It's the reason why Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), the newly rebranded parent company of Facebook, is valued at $375 billion today.

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It's the main reason why Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth equal to the GDP of Hungary.

Now, you probably already knew this, or at least noticed this happening to you in real time.

Ever wonder how you're miraculously served ads that coincide in topic and theme with recent searches or recent social media posts… or even recent chat conversations you've had with people?

That's the wonderful online data-gathering consumer-tapping mechanism at work.

Sometimes even things you've talked about with people physically present in your house start showing up in your ad streams… You think any of that is an accident?

It's not.

Your data is your value to these giant companies, and when they offer you a bit of free cheese for some of your screen time, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

There's a lot of Blade Runner-level dystopian undertones at play here, but, unfortunately, it gets much, much darker.

Political Correctness 2.0 Is Here

So long as you're a good, well-behaved consumer, this give and take between you and those providing your online experiences day and night, every day of the year, is maintained.

But make one mistake… post one less-than-acceptable comment on Twitter, or Facebook… and it can all come crashing down.

You can get banned, get deplatformed, lose access to those 50,000 email messages you've been storing, all because of an unpopular opinion or a poorly worded remark.

Everything you've become accustomed to having and even relying on in your daily routine can get pulled out from under you, and guess what? There's nothing you can do about it.

These mega-corporations may command market capitalizations bigger than most countries economies, but they're still owned and operated by boards of directors and shareholders, not governments.

They own the services they provide, and they provide those services at their pleasure.

When Big Data and big government begin to collude, the results can be truly shocking.

This past winter, the Canadian government froze 210 bank accounts belonging to individuals protesting Justin Trudeau's draconian COVID travel restrictions.

The primary method of identification of these individuals was through social media.

The Precedent Has Been Set

And that's Canada, our supposedly mild-mannered, eternally polite, decent-natured northern neighbor.

Do you have any doubts that our own government — or worse yet, any of our far left-dominated tech giants — is going to bat an eye before doing the same thing to anybody whose political stance conflicts with today's prevailing leftist undercurrents?

The reality check you're going to receive in the next few years may be more than you can handle.

And it's for this reason that I'm writing today.

You see, a solution to this new-age Orwellian disaster may be right around the corner.

The company behind this new technology is already in operation, servicing thousands of clients with one goal in mind.

It leaves the freedom of what to do with the data to the owners of the data — people like you and me.

Use this service and you have a choice. Market your data yourself or keep it completely private, as you probably assumed it would be in the first place.

The company's business model, put more plainly, is to help you take the power back from our technocratic overlords at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and the like.

Now, with a list of rivals like that, you'd expect this company to also be valued in the billions of dollars, perhaps even tens of billions.

David vs. Goliath of the 21st Century

In this case, you would be wrong. This company is still basically a startup, valued in the low millions of dollars.

To some investors, that spells risk and danger, but a very certain type of risk-tolerant speculators recognize this as exactly the kind of thing that could blow up by a factor of 10 or 100 and make all early-comers rich in the process.

That's precisely the kind of investors I'm writing to today… Because this company, unlike most Silicon Valley-based startups, is already public.

Its shares are already trading (albeit very thinly, but they're trading), the company is putting out press releases, and business is growing — revenue is up 277% year over year, if you want to get precise. 

When I saw this opportunity earlier this year, I knew I was sitting on a potential gold mine. Companies this powerful and this important simply are NOT available to the retail investor.

Typically, to get in at a stage this early, you need to know the founders to buy even one solitary share.

So, to get my readers the information as quickly and efficiently as possible, I put together an in-depth info package that boils down the problem, the solution, and, most importantly, the long-term potential.

Today, I'm making that information available to our Wealth Daily readers for the very first time.

Get immediate access now, right here. No registration required.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.