In 1988, the United States Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act. The trigger was simple and, by today’s standards, almost quaint. A newspaper had published the VHS rental history of Robert Bork, then a nominee to the Supreme Court. The public and lawmakers were outraged that a video store could hand over a list of what someone had watched at home. Within months, a strong privacy law was on the books.
That reaction tells us something important: people once understood that records of personal choices — even something as ordinary as movie rentals — deserved protection.
Today the situation is reversed.
Data as a product
Data brokers now routinely sell detailed lists of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. They sell lists of people with gambling problems. They sell data on employees, their families, health conditions, financial status, and location patterns. These lists are packaged and offered to anyone willing to pay — advertisers, scammers, risk-scoring companies, and anyone with money without any vetting.
What shocked Congress in 1988 is now an ordinary commercial product.
The consequences are real. People with cognitive decline are targeted by scams. Individuals with gambling problems are pursued with ever more precise advertising. Location and behavioural data allows people to be targeted, profiled and manipulated. Sensitive attributes that should be protected are treated as just another marketing segment.
The reverse centaur
Author and activist Cory Doctorow describes a deeper shift taking place with the rise of large-scale AI systems. He uses the term “reverse centaur.”
In classical automation theory, a centaur is a human assisted by a machine — the person remains in control and uses the tool to work better or faster. A reverse centaur is the opposite: the machine becomes the main “brain,” and the human is reduced to a low-level helper whose job is to feed, correct, or serve the system.
In this arrangement, people are no longer primarily users of technology. They become sources of data and labour that keep the machine running. Everyday communications, documents, location trails, and private habits are extracted, processed, and turned into training material or targeting profiles. The value flows upward to the systems and the companies that own them; the individuals providing the raw material retain little control.
From personal privacy to organisational risk
The same dynamic is now reaching inside companies. Internal emails, strategy discussions, client details, process knowledge, and the informal know-how that makes one organisation better than another are increasingly absorbed into external systems. What was once confidential business advantage risks becoming just another dataset — available, in aggregated or derived form, to competitors, financial firms, or anyone else who can profit from it.
The 1988 law protected the privacy of VHS rentals because society still believed that certain records of personal life should remain private. We have not built equivalent protections for the far more intimate and valuable data that now flows through email, documents, and digital collaboration tools.
Privacy is no longer only a personal concern. It is also a question of who controls the knowledge that organisations and individuals depend on.
