While shaping behavior is amoral, implementation raises ethical, legal, and policy concerns. Modern technology has presented authorities with new, improved, inexpensive, and more convenient methods of accessing, amassing, analyzing, collecting, distributing, exchanging, manipulating, matching, mining, recording, sharing, and storing data and information without the subjects' knowledge or informed consent. Ease, fear, bartered rewards and gradual desensitization are used to eliminate individual privacy. Almost everyone is data matched in systems that contain errors and threats. Surveillance, the instrument of oppression, is within the power of business and governmental authorities.
Personal data is a unit of exchange that is openly monitored and used to increase power.
Modern existence data includes name, home addresses, pictures, social security numbers, medical treatment, and insurance records. Information is obtained voluntarily, involuntarily, under duress, and fraudulently. The sources include public records, quasi-public records, marketing data, business records, financial records, personal records, and Internet use. The data can often be accessed, on-line for free or subscription, independent of location or authority. A person's level of control is poor to moderate.