Data Information
They Know You
Nine million Bolivians online, three and a half hours a day. What data is, how it gets collected without you noticing, and why here it is worth more.
By Violeta Ayala — Tecnóloga Creativa
What data is
Data is not numbers. It is you.
It is not a list with your name and your ID number. It is a portrait built out of small things.
What time you open your phone. Which video you watch to the end. Which one you skip after two seconds. Where you stop to read. What you type and delete before sending.
From that, a system knows what time you get angry and what made you angry. What you complain about. What worries you this week and did not worry you last week. What time you cannot sleep.
Someone who knows all of that about nine million people. Who sells you nothing. Who gets paid to change your vote. And whom you have never seen.
What you hand over
You do not give your data to anyone. You leave it behind.
Every video you finish. Every one you skip. Where you slow down. When you open the app. What you search for and what you erase before sending it.
One like says little. A thousand likes say who you are.
With enough signals, a system can estimate your age, your neighborhood, your rough income, your religion, your politics and your mood this week. You never told anyone.
And you do not need to install anything. In the Cambridge Analytica case, only 53 people in Australia installed the app that collected the data.
311,127 were affected. The app also took the data of the friends of whoever installed it.
Your neighbor installs something. And in you go.
Bolivia online
By the end of 2025, nine million Bolivians were using the internet. Seven out of every ten people in the country.
71.3% of the country
Global average: 2 hours 21 minutes. Bolivia spends an hour more than the world, every day. And two out of three connections come through a phone.
Notice something odd in that table. There are more social media accounts than there are people online.
Because one person can hold three accounts. And because not every account is a person. That is also where bot farms live.
Add it up. Nine million people handing over three and a half hours of signal every day, almost all of it from a phone they carry with them.
That is the raw material.
How they move you
Start with the important part: they are not trying to change your mind. That is expensive and it almost never works.
They are trying to change your mood and your priority. What matters most to you this week. What you carry into the voting booth. That works, and it is cheap.
And here is something that makes Bolivia different. Voting is compulsory.
In the United States, half a campaign is spent making certain people stay home. Here everyone turns up. So the money is not spent discouraging you. It is spent reaching the undecided, pushing spoiled ballots, and wearing you down until you mark anything.
Turn it around and it gets clearer: here your data is worth more.
Because you are going to vote no matter what. Nobody has to convince you to show up. Only what you show up with.
One. They do not talk to everyone. They talk to you.
The trader in the market gets the message about the dollar. The mother in El Alto gets the one about crime. The nineteen-year-old gets the one about jobs. Same candidate, three faces, and none of the three sees the others.
Two. They test fifty versions of the same message.
They change the photo, the color, the first line. They measure which one made you stop. They keep that one and throw out the other forty-nine. Tomorrow they test fifty more. That is not advertising, it is a laboratory with you inside it.
Three. They go looking for your anger and your fear.
Not out of malice. Because anger travels and calm does not. What outrages you moves for free. You become the delivery driver.
Four. They look for your twins.
They find a thousand people who behave like you and send them whatever moved you. Nobody asked them anything. Resembling you was enough.
Five. And this is the worst one. They make you feel that everyone already thinks this way.
Accounts repeating the same line, comments that appear first, trends that climb on their own. Nobody convinced you of anything. They just left you alone with your doubt.
So when someone says they had daily data on Bolivians, they are not describing a spreadsheet.
They are describing a thermometer. Knowing every day what hurts us, where, and at what hour.
Why it is easier here
Bolivia has no personal data protection law. It is one of the few countries in the region still without one. Two drafts have been written and neither has become law.
Nobody is obliged to tell you what data they hold on you, where they got it, or to delete it if you ask.
There is also no rule requiring a campaign to declare what data it used to target you. And no office able to check.
In Europe that has been mandatory since October 2025. Here the box does not exist.
What you can do
The personal steps help a little. Check app permissions on your phone and take away location and contacts from the ones that do not need them. Turn off personalized advertising in each platform's settings.
And be wary of quizzes, filters and games that ask you to log in with your account. That is exactly the door from 2018.
What helps most is simpler. When something outrages you a lot and very fast, wait ten minutes before sharing it.
Speed is the business. Your pause breaks it.
And the collective part is the only thing that changes the size of the problem. A data protection law with an authority able to enforce it. An electoral rule requiring every campaign to declare what data it used.
Your phone settings cannot give you any of that.
When someone truly knows you, you know who they are too. That is a deal between two people.
Here someone knows you completely, decided what to show you today, and you cannot even ask their name.
Sources
- DataReportal, We Are Social and Meltwater. Digital 2026 report on Bolivia, with figures from October and December 2025: nine million internet users, 71.3 percent penetration, and 9.43 million social media user identities.
- Platform figures and daily usage time in Bolivia, reported from the same study by Bolivian specialist outlets.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Civil penalty proceedings against Meta Platforms: 53 installations of the app in Australia and 311,127 users affected.
- European Union Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, in force since October 10, 2025.
- Draft Personal Data Protection Laws from Bolivia's electronic government agency and from the InternetBolivia.org Foundation.
- Political Constitution of the State, articles 21 and 130.
Connectivity figures come from a commercial industry report and are estimates, not a census. Social media counts measure identities, not people: one person may hold several, and not every account belongs to a real person. The targeting mechanisms described are documented standard practices in digital advertising, and not a description of any particular campaign.
