First, citizens need to put pressure on Google, Facebook and other technology platforms to behave in the interests of the democracies that enabled their unrivaled success. Public pressure is surprisingly effective at holding these companies accountable. When people drew attention to the epidemic of viral “fake news” hoaxers or the fact that jihadi and Nazi YouTube videos are being monetized by the world’s largest brands, funding extremists, these companies answered to their customers. By zeroing in on how the duopoly has a duty to democracy itself, we can question whether these firms are on our side, or not.

Second, those in the US concerned about these issues should seek alliances across political lines to advance reforms. Industry lobbyists are there to confuse lawmakers that these rules will inhibit innovation. The only innovation reasonable privacy bright lines will inhibit is degradations to the informed voter that undergirds our ability to hold politicians accountable in the polling booths. Illinois, the only state with a facial recognition privacy law on the books, is leading the way. Many other states are considering protections such as California, Connecticut and New Mexico. Every voter should have the right to request personal voter data dossiers and learn how politicians might be using predictive ideological models to manage campaigns in their district.

Finally, the most ambitious solution may be abolishing our Electoral College. The advent of geo-targeted predictive microtargeting and the redefinition of the public sphere into filter bubbles has become a new cybersecurity threat model. Because a tiny fraction of votes count more than the vast majority, and because we may have proven that voter data is being processed internationally, we must take drastic actions to equalize the value of one vote. Deploying hyper-targeted voter media that constructs narrow or outright fabricated versions of the truth to influence small subsets of voters in strategically important geographies is a scenario our founding fathers never imagined.

We may never know the true scale of the Cambridge Analytica voter data and hyper-targeted media operation in the 2016 election. But what is clear is that in the future these methods will only become more powerful, matched with new, machine-driven methods to produce artificial reality media and even more powerful social platforms to deliver it. Unless we direct our collective outrage at tech companies, state legislatures and Congress for diminishing our data privacy, we risk ceding democracy to plutocrats with dark databases and vast resources to surreptitiously exert their will.

Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab.

David Carroll is Associate Professor of Media Design at Parsons School of Design.