Early in the documentary, Prof. David Carroll describes how we are living in a digital world and we all have online identities that allow the people who hold the data to know what makes us as individuals tick. In a sense that is what Big Data is. Big Data is the data in large quantities that companies hold on the citizens of a country. It shows them what we are interested in, our relationships with other people, and just about use in general.  Project Alamo was the “digital” arm of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Cambridge Analytica was another company working on Project Alamo. They were known as the brain of the data. They collect data points on US citizens and target them directly with campaign ads. One of the ex-employees described it as a propaganda machine. Carroll became interested in this company because of all the data it contained on Americans. In the documentary, it is said that the company holds around 5,000 points of data on every single American. His goal is to launch a legal investigation against Cambridge Analytica to view his voter profile heald by Cambridge Analytica.

The article “Death of the Private Self” describes the evolution of FaceBook and how FaceBook and other social media platforms affect our lives and self-esteem. As a society, we constantly compare ourselves to people on the internet and feel the need to make our lives more exciting to fit this exciting life. There are a few connections you can draw between the article and the documentary. First of all, we put a ton of information about our lives online. The article has to do with what influences us to put our info out there and the documentary explains what big data companies do with this information. As we post more and more online, the data companies have about us increases and increases. Our drive to fit in only fuels the collection of data. Another connection made is the one about young people. In the article, it is stated that people as young as 11 or 12 have at least one social media platform downloaded. This relates to Prof. Carroll’s worry about his children being on the internet at such a young age. It reveals that even at an age that young, companies can still build a digital profile about you.