YOU walk around leaking data like a bucket riddled with buckshot. Your likes, your dislikes, what you’ve bought, what you’ll buy, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your fears, your weaknesses, your medical concerns, your sexual preferences, your political opinions, your prejudices, your secrets.

Every time you pick up your phone or laptop or tablet, you’re spewing your soul into the ether and allowing any company that’s savvy enough to hoover it up, mine it, monetise it, and use it against you as psychologically sophisticated advertising and political propaganda.

We may as well have given the tech giants and political parties the keys to the house and told them to snoop through our bedrooms while we’re out.

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Right now, Britain’s political parties are hoovering up your data and starting to use it against you. There’s a new online political advertising blitz currently underway. Spending by UK parties on Facebook ads has suddenly increased, indicating that a General Election is probably in the offing. Similar patterns before have often preceded elections.

In the last month, the Conservatives spent £80,000 on Facebook. Their ads encourage viewers to click on them so they can gather more data on you, of course, meaning the next ads will be even more targeted towards you.

During the EU referendum, Vote Leave spent £2.7m on targeted digital ads, some of which were eerily specific. One was able to work out if you had environmental sympathies and target you with political messaging which featured a polar bear on an iceberg with the words: “The EU blocks our ability to speak out and protect polar bears. Click to help them.”

Dominic Cummings, now Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s henchman-in-chief, was the former campaign director of Vote Leave. He’s currently pushing through Brexit with all the finesse of a medieval army and a battering ram.

Targeted online ads are easily exploitable by those who want to spread disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Russia loves them. If you often wonder to yourself why so many people seem to believe so many absurd, and even dangerous, ideas then look no further than the junction where politics, advertising and social media meet.

The UK’s electoral laws are not fit to protect us from this 21st century propaganda machine. If a political party produces a leaflet, they have to register who funded it. Not so with online ads. There’s no effective regulator of online political advertising. And if there’s no proper regulator, then why would a political party not kick back and enjoy the Wild West while they still can, milking the system for all its worth … at our expense, and to the detriment of truth and democracy.

If you’ve got a friend or colleague who’s suddenly come down with a bad case of populism – flirting with extreme ideas, spouting hate, backing cranks and bullies – then they’ve probably had the magic worked on them by the Cambridge Analyticas of this world.

Cambridge Analytica infamously harvested the data of millions of Facebook users, created psychological profiles, and exploited the information for sophisticated social media political advertising. The firm claimed to have 5000 data points on 230 million American voters. It simultaneously denies and boasts about its involvement in the campaign to leave the EU.

If you want to inoculate yourself a little, then I recommend the new documentary The Great Hack, which brings together much of the sterling investigative journalism that the British reporter Carole Cadwalladr has been doing for years.

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The film contains a moment that ought to chill everyone. Brittany Kaiser, a former senior member of staff with Cambridge Analytica who later turned whistleblower, is giving evidence before a UK parliamentary committee investigating fake news. She tells MPs that the British government classified the technology used by Cambridge Analytica as “weapons-grade”, export-controlled. Damian Collins, chair of the committee, asks: “So what you are saying is that the proposal was for Leave.EU to use what you call ‘weapons grade communications techniques’ against the UK population?’.

Weapons of mass deception, you could say.

It’s hard not to look at the citizens of the western democracies as a whole and think to yourself: “You bloody idiots. You got what you deserved.” We gladly traded our privacy for a few likes on Facebook, and handed the keys to the kingdom to a bunch of amoral parasites who treat democracy like something they trod in at the park.

People could, of course, be wise and dump Facebook altogether. Anyone who gets their news from social media is opening themselves to disinformation and propaganda. Mainstream TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and books may run the risk of being partisan, but at least the facts are true. On social media, people choose to vote using lies as the currency.

But consumers switching off isn’t enough to control the tech giants. There’s a new movement aimed at making ‘data rights human rights’.

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The transparency project Who Targets Me – which uncovered the recent facts on UK party Facebook spending – wants social media platforms to provide detailed information about the content, targeting and spending by campaigns on political adverts. It also wants electoral regulators around the world to set high standards of transparency for political adverts and hold campaigns and platforms accountable for meeting them.

One simple step would be to create a legally robust regulator in the UK and quickly follow up with a number of high-profile criminal trials for any breaches, with the courts administering a few heavy penalties, including jail, in order to rein in the cowboys of our new Wild West.

We could and should go much further though. Is my data not my property? If so, pay me for it. It should be a legal requirement for every digital company to consider me ‘opted out’ of any exploitation of my personal data unless I say otherwise. And if I do approve the exploitation of my data, there should be an agreed price, and an absolute right of oversight by any member of the public to discover what is being done with their data. Democracy depends upon it.

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year