Octopus Overlords

we decided to test the system. A team of nine Engadget reporters in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco filed more than 150 subject access requests -- in other words, requests for personal data -- to more than 30 popular tech companies, ranging from social networks to dating apps to streaming services. We reached out before May 25th -- when previous laws for data access existed in the EU -- as well as after, to see how procedures might have changed.

The EU has had a data-protection directive since 1995, yet studies have repeatedly shown that its rights weren't well-enforced. The GDPR has been law since 2016, yet it only grew teeth this May, with companies now open to fines of up to 4 percent of global annual revenue....

...When we ask companies for all the data and profiling they do on us and they provide us back only the data we've given to them, they may not only be omitting stray details but also furthering the idea that this is all that our personal information is used for. We might think we're trading our data for a service we can see -- inputting our location to Google Maps, getting directions to the cinema -- but how companies process that data is more opaque -- tracking our location to tell others how busy the theater is or which roads to avoid. (Google, it was recently revealed, will even track where you are when you turn location sharing off.) Facebook has also come under fire for researching both how to manipulate users' emotions and (separately) how to identify when they're in psychologically vulnerable states. Just recently, we learned it's giving users reputation rankings too -- naturally without explaining how they're calculated. In short, data is our currency, but we often don't know how much we're truly paying.