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The story continues to develop around Facebook and the firm Cambridge Analytica who are at the centre of a dispute over the harvesting of personal data – specifically whether it was used to influence the outcome of the American presidential election.While Cambridge Analytica deny any wrongdoing, the company has been accused of manipulation, and most importantly data misuse. The term ‘big data’ has no agreed definition but generally refers to the vastness of datasets everywhere. By data we mean personal information about you and me. Many argue that until recently data was just sitting there, but now it’s being analysed and interpreted in radical ways. Everything from our biology, health history, where we go, what we spend, who we call, what we eat and how we holiday. Our smartphones ask for our location, our online browsing habits are monitored and our faces and voices are recorded by surveillance cameras. It’s all become part of our lives so quickly that even as we try to think through possible ethical frameworks in one area, technology has already moved on. Our speedy click and buy culture means that we are willing to surrender our most personal details whenever asked. Ease of access seems to have greater value than personal privacy. Privacy isn’t dead but so much of our life now is public. Whether or not we should be worried, it seems to me that essentially big data is about power, the potential to control and influence. Where once we thought of leaders and states as powerful, today real power lies in the organisations which hold our personal information. We don’t just leave digital footprints, we often follow the paths to which these organisations direct us. So many of the choices we think we’re making, have already been made for us. For most of us our personal autonomy is precious to us. But we aren’t just given that freedom – we are also given intelligence, imagination, and reason to help us make moral judgements. The Qur’anic verse ` the truth is from your Lord,’ let him who will believe and let him who will, reject’ is often used to straddle the tension between predestination and human freewill. Yet it seems to me that many of the problems within religious communities, including mine, lie precisely in the fact that peoples free will and personal autonomy is often undermined in the name of faith, conformity or culture. The digital world has given us a new kind of freedom, a freedom for which we did not have to struggle. But for everything that is easily obtained, there is a moral or societal cost. We just don’t fully understand the true extent of that cost yet.