In 2014 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed an online ‘Magna Carta’ to protect the Internet, as a neutral system, from government and corporate manipulation. He was responding after revelations that British and US spy agencies were carrying out mass surveillance programmes; the Cambridge Analytica scandal makes his proposal as relevant as ever.

Luciano Floridi, professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute, explains that grey power is not ordinary socio-political or military power. It is not the ability to directly influence others, but rather the power to influence those who influence power. To see grey power, you need only look at the hundreds of high-level instances of revolving-door staffing patterns between Google and European governmentsand the U.S. Department of State.

And then there is ‘surveillance capitalism’. Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, proposes that surveillance capitalism is ‘a new logic of accumulation’. The incredible evolution of computer processing power, complex algorithms and leaps in data storage capabilities combine to make surveillance capitalism possible. It is the process of accumulation by dispossession of the data that people produce.

The respected security technologist Bruce Schneier recently applied the insights of surveillance capitalism to the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook crisis.

For Schneier, ‘regulation is the only answer.’ He cites the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect next month, which stipulates that users must consent to what personal data can be saved and how it is used.