On metadata being scarier than individual data…

So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.

— Doug Rushkoff, Interview by FiveThirtyEight