The New York Times Magazine published a long-form article recently titled “The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won” discussing a group of privacy activists that successfully passed a California bill protecting user privacy from tech giants.

The article published in the New York Times Magazine opens by discussing a man named Alastair Mactaggart, a bay area real estate mogul who had made much of his money thanks to the exorbitant rent prices in areas surrounding Silicon Valley tech companies. If anyone should have been happy about the presence and actions of tech firms it should have been Mactaggart, but instead, the real estate businessman became increasingly worried about the information that these tech companies were collecting on users.

The article states:

The way Alastair Mactaggart usually tells the story of his awakening — the way he told it even before he became the most improbable, and perhaps the most important, privacy activist in America — begins with wine and pizza in the hills above Oakland, Calif. It was a few years ago, on a night Mactaggart and his wife had invited some friends over for dinner. One was a software engineer at Google, whose search and video sites are visited by over a billion people a month. As evening settled in, Mactaggart asked his friend, half-seriously, if he should be worried about everything Google knew about him. “I expected one of those answers you get from airline pilots about plane crashes,” Mactaggart recalled recently. “You know — ‘Oh, there’s nothing to worry about.’ ” Instead, his friend told him there was plenty to worry about. If people really knew what we had on them, the Google engineer said, they would flip out.

Following MacTaggart’s sudden awakening to the dangers of big tech, he began to investigate what sort of rules and privacy laws were in place to protect consumers, discovering that the United States has no single comprehensive law regulating the collection and use of consumers personal data.