At last, David has landed a double punch on the tech Goliaths. Now to hit them even harder

"She describes how the company, able to track users’ activity on and off the platform, could see when, for example, girls aged between 13 and 17 deleted a selfie. Realising that signalled the girls’ dissatisfaction with their appearance, the company saw a way to monetise that unhappiness. For a fee, a cosmetics company could serve a beauty ad to those children at that very moment.

Facebook did not hide this behaviour; they boasted of it. Wynn-Williams reveals how Facebook made a presentation for an Australian client, bragging that its ability to monitor users’ online lives – their posts, their photos, their conversations with friends – enabled them to know exactly when teenage girls were feeling “worthless”, “insecure”, “stressed”, “defeated”, “anxious”, “stupid”, “useless” and “like a failure”. Those were optimal moments for selling."

read article by Jonathan Freedland

At last, David has landed a double punch on the tech Goliaths. Now to hit them even harder | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian