When you see an ad for online gambling, it is never a matter of chance. Take, for example, the story of Sportsbet, an Australian company owned by the global gambling-industry behemoth Paddy Power. A recent investigation found that the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on highly integrated promotional activities. Traditional advertising and celebrity ambassador programs were complemented by a web presence on major platforms, informed by data collected from a wide range of sources. Banks, for instance, are a provider of data to analytics firms that gambling companies rely on to ensure advertising dollars are well spent. The data may be de-identified, but in the grand scheme of things, this is irrelevant. As we move around the web, leaving a trail of data, it gets swept up and sold in all sorts of covert and unexpected ways.

And it’s not just gambling. The digital age has allowed a host of businesses—from online lending to for-profit education—to access detailed information about potential customers, the platforms that can target them, and the money to put it all together.

Often when we think about the right to privacy, we think of the right to be let alone, unmolested by the state. But the digital age has given rise to industrialized data mining, content curation, and automated decision-making, all of which undermine democracy and intensify social divisions. It calls for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy—one that can appreciate both the collective and individual nature of this right.

Our digital spaces are increasingly organized around our capacity and propensity to spend. The apparatus of observational intelligence that dominates the web was established by private companies, and assesses our worth as individuals through the lens of consumerism, according to Shoshana Zuboff, as described in her book Surveillance Capitalism. All kinds of companies pick through our online behavior for clues about how we might be convinced to spend money. These practices particularly affect poor people, who are more dependent on cheap or free online services. The services appear to cost nothing, but payment is in data rather than dollars. Such a transaction renders the user into a source to be mined for information and—in a way that is not obvious to the web consumer—transforms the experience of online life into one saturated by the logic of the market. As Michael Fertik, the founder of reputation.com, bluntly put it: “The rich see a different Internet than the poor.”

The for-profit education sector is an illustrative example. Nearly every private college in the U.S. earns most of their revenue from multi-billion-dollar federal financial aid programs. These colleges specifically target poor and vulnerable people, luring them with the promise of social mobility. “A potential student’s first click on a for-profit college website,” wrote Cathy O’Neil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction, “comes only after a vast industrial process has laid the groundwork.” This includes finding the perfect moment at which people are most open to taking drastic steps to improve their situation, as revealed through Google searches or college questionnaires. Companies also buy information from websites that post fake job ads, or ads promising to help people obtain Medicaid or food stamps, and then ask those responding to the ads if they are interested in a college education. The poor are basically stalked into enrolling, with colleges routinely having bigger budgets for marketing than they do for the costs of providing tuition. “The for-profit colleges do not bother targeting rich students,” O’Neil observed. “They and their parents know too much.”