Donald Trump's victory in last year's presidential election was a seismic political shock, but also served as a wake-up call about the ways that digital technology can shape outcomes both at the ballot box and, presumably, the check-out counter.
On the one hand, Trump's relationship with Cambridge Analytica – an enterprise claiming to posses 5,000 datapoints on 220 million American adults, and that uses algorithms and other automated tools in tapping "more than 100 data variables to model target audience groups and predict the behavior of like-minded people" – was perceived as a central componentof his...