We let technology into our lives. And now it’s starting to control us | Rachel Holmes

Internet giants are accessing vast amounts of personal data and using it to shape our behaviour. It’s reminiscent of East Germany under the StasiIn 1998, I joined the UK launch team for an e-commerce startup named after the world’s largest river. The smart idea was to harness the unprecedented cataloguing capacity of the emerging internet to sell books – a product with a long shelf-life – online. In those days, now regarded as the classical era in tech history, the bounda