Ex Machina might be about artificial intelligence, but what really got to me was the issues of internet privacy that the movie addresses. In the movie, Nathan pulls out much of the data he needs to create his human-like robots out of information he gets from unwitting phone and search engine users. For instance, he models his androids’ facial expressions using information captured from the cameras on the phones of thousands of users. He picked Caleb as his modified Turing Test “administrator” because he was able to deduce his loneliness and malleability from his Bluebook searches. Heck, Nathan’s ability to pry into other people’s private electronic data is so deep that he was able to base some of Ava’s features on Caleb’s pornography collection. What’s terrifying about Nathan’s being able to get all this private data whenever he wants is that there’s no way for us to know whether or not Google or Facebook has stored this kind of data on us. Sure, AI is scary in its own way-computers so adept at being human that we no longer know the difference is frightening. But Internet privacy, or lack thereof, is a much more pressing issue in this present day. After all, the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal had happened only half a year ago, and Facebook suffered no real consequences from that; according to CBS, Facebook was able to recover all the financial losses from the scandal within two months. And who’s to say that large tech companies like Facebook or Google don’t have all of our personal data, ready to be used for a purpose (such as AI) that we didn’t know about and didn’t agree to?