Ms Carole Cadwalladr:

What is most troubling about it for me is that individuals have no idea why they are being targeted or on the basis of what data they are seeing an advertisement. Somebody who lives in the same house might be targeted with a different advertisement and people would not be aware of it. This happens in darkness; therefore, it is influence being brought to bear on individuals based on unknown information that is being collected on them across the Internet. It is a really different idea about politics and elections from those we have had at any other time. It seems to be completely incompatible. We previously had a situation where parties and politicians would come up with ideas and place them in the public domain. We would have had a discussion about them and then voted on them. Now they are finding out information on you and in what you are interested, crafting a particular policy that somehow might speak to it and showing it to you in darkness, as it were. That is just not known to the rest of society at all and it is profoundly anti-democratic.