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Every choice you make — where you go, what you watch, where you shop — is political.
These choices all generate data, and in the age of "technology-intensive campaigning", that determines your political value.
Analysts in the United States talk of a rise in geographic "micro-targeting" — where political campaigns track people's phones to build voter profiles.
"Cell phones are constantly giving off data as you move about," says Daniel Kreiss, a media expert from the University of North Carolina.
"A campaign or an advocacy organisation can run digital advertising displayed to people who are in some geographic radius at a particular moment in time."
Professor Kreiss expects micro-targeting to play an increasing role in the upcoming US presidential campaign, which will pit US President Donald Trump against Joe Biden.
And he says there are already signs that the Trump campaign has the digital upper hand.
Trump's campaign advantage
Technology-intensive campaigning had its genesis in Howard Dean's campaign for the 2004 Democratic primaries.
While Mr Dean was unsuccessful in securing the nomination, his team demonstrated the enormous potential of internet-based electioneering, a strategy later credited with helping Barack Obama take the White House.
But come 2020, it's the Republicans who have so far shown the most digital savvy, Professor Kreiss says.
"One of the things that was so innovative about the Trump campaign in 2016 was that it was really the first presidential campaign in the United States to spend close to an equal amount of money online as on television advertisements," he says.
Mr Trump's digital strategist back in 2016, Brad Parscale, has since been given overall charge of his entire re-election campaign — and he is running a "digital first" strategy.
Incumbency, says Professor Kreiss, is also another important factor.
"In an era of technology-intensive campaigning … candidates that have a longer on-ramp before an election tend to have a significant strategic advantage," he says.
"The Trump campaign has essentially been running a general election campaign over the last year, year-and-a-half.
"They've been collecting lots of data on their potential supporters, on people who might be persuadable, on people who might be supporting Trump but might be less likely to vote."
And that level of voter information and contact is going to be difficult for the Democrats to match.
Politics as a sharing business
The Oxford Internet Institute's Samantha Bradshaw says modern political campaigns focused on social media preference shareability over policy content.
Because of that, online political content is increasingly in the form of memes and short videos.
"That gets people engaged, it elicits people's emotions, it's something that can be consumed relatively easily, especially when there are so many things on social media now competing for our attention," Ms Bradshaw says.
That probably explains why the 218,000 individual Facebook ads the Trump team posted on Facebook last year had very little to do with policy detail.
According to analysis conducted by the Guardian, the most popular ones were attacks on the so-called "fake media", followed by posts about immigration, the Trump border wall, gun rights, impeachment, the economy and the Supreme Court — all issues likely to motivate the president's existing political base.
A widening chasm between the truth and political disinformation
London-based advertising executive Alex Tait says there's an urgent need for politicians and political parties to be subject to the same sorts of truth in advertising rules that exist in many countries to regulate consumer advertising.
Mr Tait is a co-founder of the Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising.
"It was born out of a frustration that political advertising just has no rules in the UK, so you can say whatever you want in an ad," he says.
He argues that while there have always been instances of politicians using misleading language and skewed data to bolster their electoral fortunes, the situation has rapidly escalated in recent years.
"The acceleration of technology and techniques adopted by parties is really outstripping the fact that there is a lack of regulation, and it's becoming globally just an increasingly big problem," he says.
During the recent UK election, Mr Tait used a team of volunteers to track political disinformation. The abuses they found were widespread and came from all mainstream political parties.
"These new techniques are leading to a sort of arms race of malpractice that we really need rules to stop," he says.
One of the most egregious examples involved the governing Conservative Party temporarily changing the name of its main press account to Fact Check UK during a televised leaders' debate.
"So, it seemed like an official blue-ticked fact-checking service on Twitter, and it was deeming a lot of what the Labour and other politicians were saying as being false," Mr Tait says.
The enemy is mostly within
Ms Bradshaw has also been involved in tracking the growth of political disinformation online.
She's part of an Oxford initiative called the Computational Propaganda Project.
For the past three years they've run a Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation.
"We are up to 70 countries where we've observed some kind of social media manipulation campaign," she says.
That number was 48 back in 2018. In 2017, the first year of the project, it was 28.
"So, there's quite a big jump in terms of the number of cases that we've identified over the past three years," she says.
Ms Bradshaw's research indicates that while democracies should continue to be concerned about rising foreign interference, the overwhelming amount of political disinformation and deception is homegrown.
She points to Republican senator Mitt Romney's purchase of a botnet to artificially amplify the number of his followers online as an example, and also to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was found to have used a network of fake accounts to spread propaganda and disinformation about his electoral rivals.
"Part of this growth has to do with the fact that more and more governments or political parties are seeing social media as the new way to reach voters and to spread information," Ms Bradshaw says.
"It's very cheap and makes a very effective tool for getting information into the feeds of everyday people."
Professor Kreiss sees recent voluntary self-regulatory moves by American technology platforms as a positive development.
"In essence platform companies like Facebook and Google are stepping in where government has failed in creating their own electoral rules," he says.
"So, all the major platform companies now have ad transparency databases that enable the public to access the digital advertising content of presidential and down-ballot campaigns as they vie for office.
"Another big change since the 2016 election is requiring verification. During the 2016 cycle, you didn't have to verify, if you were a political advertiser, that you were actually in the United States and complying with election laws."
He also says a number of platforms have placed limits on the ability of parties to micro-target.
But he says those changes, while welcome, don't affect what he calls "organic speech" — which is essentially most of the political banter that occurs when ordinary people express their opinions on social media.
"That's a much harder problem for platform companies to solve, in part because it is not always clear where organic speech is coming from. Is it coming from foreign interests? Is it coming from domestic actors?" he says.
"If a foreign interest originates something, but organic US actors are then involved in spreading it, then policing that in some way might run afoul of the First Amendment.
"That also is potentially harmful for democracy. I'm not sure we are much further along at solving those problems in 2020 than we were in 2016."
Mr Tait believes it's important to recognise that digital campaigning isn't all bad — it can have a positive influence by enabling smaller parties to campaign more effectively and reach a broader audience.
And he says it's worth remembering that political speech prior to the digital age also had its problems.
"If you go back several decades, you had a couple of press barons really controlling a lot of the messaging and tone of campaigns in some senses," he says.
Finding a balance, he says, is going to be an increasingly pressing problem for all democracies.
"We need to bring it in line with some of the safeguards we've got around consumer advertising," Mr Tait says.
"The lack of rules now is leading to a sense of 'win at all costs' political strategy, and it just has a massively detrimental effect to democracy."
Topics: world-politics, advertising-and-marketing, information-and-communication, advertising, political-parties, government-and-politics, donald-trump, united-states, united-kingdom