«Eagle Eye». What a 2008 Film Predicted More Precisely Than Forecasts
In reality this is not one system — it is an ecosystem of hundreds of companies: TTD, Oracle BlueKai, Meta, Criteo, Piano, Cxense. Each sees a piece. Together they see everything.
Layer 1 — Identity Resolution — (who you are as a person)
These companies solve the main task: to link an anonymous digital trace with a real person. LiveRamp — the world’s largest identity graph. Takes your online actions and links them with offline purchases, home address, phone. Works with thousands of brands around the world. Tapad — specialises in cross-device matching. Determines that your phone, work laptop and home tablet belong to one person — even if you did not log in anywhere. Acxiom — stores profiles on 2.5 billion people, that is about 68% of all internet users in the world. Demographics, incomes, lifestyle, purchasing habits. Clients — banks, insurance companies, retail chains, governments. Experian, Equifax, TransUnion — the three largest credit agencies. They know your financial history and sell it not only to banks but also to advertisers. Epsilon/Publicis — data from loyalty programmes. They know exactly what you bought in a store, how often and for what sum. ID5, Neustar/TransUnion — identification without cookies, a new generation of surveillance technology that works even when you have cleared your browser history.
Layer 2 — Data Management — (what you read and what interests you) Lotame — builds interest profiles on the basis of the content you consume. You read articles about real estate — you are a potential home buyer. Quantcast — measures site audiences and builds AI profiles. Predicts your future intentions on the basis of past behaviour. Nielsen, Comscore — measurement of media consumption. They know what you watched, listened to, read. Gemius — the dominant audience-measurement system in Central and Eastern Europe. Present on most regional news sites.
Layer 3 — Advertising exchanges — (who sells access to you in real time) When you open a site’s page — within 200 milliseconds an auction takes place. Dozens of companies simultaneously place bids for the right to show you advertising. The winner pays — you see a banner. All of this happened while the page was loading. Google DV360 / GAM — the largest advertising ecosystem in the world. Participates in most auctions globally. The Trade Desk — the largest independent DSP (demand-side platform). Buys ad impressions on behalf of brands. Xandr / Microsoft — the former AppNexus, one of the largest advertising exchanges. Magnite, PubMatic, OpenX, Index Exchange — the largest SSPs (supply-side platforms). Sell ad slots on behalf of publishers. Criteo — specialises in retargeting. Knows what you looked at on a store’s site and will show this same product on other sites for weeks. Adform, Equativ, Adnuntius, Setupad, Eskimi, Sparteo, RichAudience, Adtelligent, Audigent, 4dex.io — European and global participants in the same auction.
Layer 4 — Consent Management — (who manages your consent). That very banner with the «Accept all» or «Customise» buttons — is the product of separate companies. OneTrust / CookieLaw, Didomi, TrustArc, CookieYes — the largest providers of consent-management systems. They know what choice you made on which site and when. An important nuance: a consent-management company is also a recipient of your behavioural data. They see your decisions on thousands of sites simultaneously. Google Tag Manager, Tealium — tag-management systems. Through them all the other trackers are loaded onto the site. One configuration file — dozens of surveillance scripts.
Layer 5 — Behavioural analytics — (how exactly you interact with content) Microsoft Clarity — literally records your session as a video. The site’s administrators can play back every movement of your mouse, every click, every pause while reading. Google Analytics 4 — present on most sites in the world. Knows your route between pages, the time on each of them, the device and location. Chartbeat — analytics for media publications. Sends a ping every few seconds while the page is open — even if you do nothing. Cloudflare Insights, New Relic — monitoring from the network-infrastructure level. dimatter.ai — a new player, an AI behavioural-analytics platform embedded in media sites.
Layer 6 — CRM and Email Marketing — (what you buy and what letters you receive). Salesforce Marketing Cloud — the largest CRM ecosystem. Most large brands you have ever given an email use precisely it. Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Marketo, HubSpot — marketing-automation systems. They know which letters you opened, what you clicked and when. Genesys — a customer-service platform. Analyses your support calls and online behaviour in your personal account. Pushwoosh, OneSignal — push notifications. They know when you are online and whether you react to messages.
Layer 7 — The social graph (who you are in society)
Meta / Facebook / Instagram — the largest social graph in history. Knows your friends, relatives, political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation — through likes, subscriptions and messages. Through the Advanced Matching technology it links your visits to third-party sites with your account via a hash of your email address. Pinterest — visual interests. What you want to buy, how you want to furnish your home, what lifestyle attracts you. LinkedIn / Microsoft — the professional graph. Career, skills, employers, professional connections. VKontakte — the social graph of the Russian-speaking audience with integration of musical preferences.
Layer 8 — Location data (where you are physically) SafeGraph, Veraset, Unacast — GPS data from mobile devices accurate to the metre. They know where you live, work, which shops you visit, which churches, clinics, political events. Foursquare — location intelligence, the movement routes of millions of people.
Layer 9 — Verification and biometrics — (your face and documents) Veriff — an Estonian company. Verifies identity through documents and facial biometrics for thousands of services across the EU. Stores biometric data. Onfido — an analogue, biometric verification. LexisNexis Risk Solutions — public registers, court records, identity verification for the financial sector.
What this means in aggregate
None of these companies individually sees the full picture. But together they form a detailed profile: who you are, what you read, what you buy, who you communicate with, where you are, how you behave at different times of day, on which devices, at what internet speed. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply a business model in which data about people is goods. Each participant sees its piece of the puzzle — and sells it to the other participants. By researchers’ estimates, there are about 5,000 companies in the world that collect, process and sell personal data. Most of them you have never heard of. Here is how this ecosystem is arranged.
What the system really fears
States fear not developed consciousness as such. They fear organised developed consciousness. One person who understands the system — is an interesting subject for monitoring. A hundred such people who coordinate — is already what systems call a threat. This is precisely why the atomisation of society is advantageous — when everyone thinks alone, even thinks correctly, nothing changes systemically. And here Palantir comes into play and changes the outcome of events. Not to find an already existing threat — that was possible before it too. But to see a threat that is only just forming. Preventively. Before it has become aware of itself. The algorithm does not wait for a manifesto or a meeting. It sees similar search queries, intersections in social graphs, synchronisation of activity in time, common sources of information, financial connections. And classifies this as a forming network — while the participants still think they are simply reading the same articles. But the system has one blind spot. It is tuned to search for discrepancies. Mismatches between what a person says publicly and what they do in the shadows. Double lives. Hidden motives. It is there that it looks for a threat. A person who has no discrepancy — who writes openly what they think, acts consistently, does not hide and does not pretend — is inconvenient for the algorithm. Not because they are dangerous. But because they give no entry point. The only truly invulnerable position is not technical anonymity, which does not exist. But behavioural consistency. When between what you think, what you say and what you do — there is no discrepancy. The system manages fear. And fear is the main instrument of control. Fear of death sells insurance. Fear of poverty keeps you at work. Fear of loneliness sells social networks. Fear of the unknown makes you vote for «stability». A person who has inner knowledge about their path — is not managed through fear. They do not have this entry point. This is more dangerous than any political activism. An activist can be discredited, intimidated, bought. A person who simply knows — there is nothing to take them by. For a system used to managing through fear — this is the only thing that does not yield to management.