As the scale and scope of the Facebook personal data scandal grows, there are questions galore: why Facebook took so long to act, whether the company should be held liable, and just how much trouble the executives at Cambridge Analytica are in, across multiple jurisdictions. The FTC has opened an official investigation into Facebook; Palantir, billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel’s data company, has been implicated in the scandal; and so has Trump’s new national security advisor, John Bolton.

But what’s most important are the implications for the future.

Though it’s not clear if Cambridge Analytica’s behavioral profiling and microtargeting had any measurable effect on the 2016 US election, these technologies are advancing quickly—faster than academics can study their effects and certainly faster than policymakers can respond. The next generation of such firms will almost certainly deliver on the promise.

Research points to where the field is headed. At an event that NYC Media Lab hosted in 2015, Alexander Tuzhilin, professor of information systems at the NYU Stern School of Business, pointed out that most of the targeting applications we see today represent the second generation of these technologies. The data employed includes context awareness, spatiotemporal and mobile data, multi-criteria ratings, social-media data, conversational recommendations, and more. These are standard tools of the trade used in targeting by internet marketers, as well as by Cambridge Analytica in 2016.