Carles Tamayo, how good you are!

There isn't a week that goes by without us receiving a call from an unknown number with offers to change electricity companies or get improvements from telephone companies. Technology experts have warned us multiple times with that mantra that says if a service is free, then we are the product, and yet, we don't listen to them. Every day we click the 'accept' option several times when we enter a website or download a mobile app without knowing what 'cookies' imply. Nor do we bother to read the very long conditions we sign every time we consent to the use of this data. We have normalized being asked to fill out forms to become clients of shops and supermarkets in exchange for discounts. We are aware that all this has to do with the use of our personal data, but we have accepted it docilely as an inevitable inertia. From now on, however, there is no excuse to say that you do not understand this dark world that lives by devouring our personal data. Reporter Carles Tamayo, author of the magnificent documentary series How to Catch a Monster, in which he pursued the pederast Lluís Gros, now explains to us what kind of companies obtain our data, how much they are worth, and what they do with it. Now we can know where our life, which we believe to be private, ends up, and what we are accepting.He does it in a new episode of Se nos ha ido de las manos, his program on La 1. Tamayo once again achieves journalistic brilliance. In the chapter El activo eres tú, the reporter collapses Arenys de Mar to show how people are capable of selling their souls to the devil for a pittance. The gas station sequence is very powerful and symptomatic: it illustrates what we do every day through much more subtle strategies.The report has the ability to clearly explain very complex and dark business dynamics. It does so with the virtue of not lying or working with hidden cameras. It shows professional generosity by giving prominence to its entire team throughout the work process. It uses research methods that require creativity and organizational complexity. And, to top it all off, it's all wrapped in a patina of well-measured sense of humor. Tamayo doesn't do it to make fun of people, but because he has a way of looking at the world, with a certain distance, that provokes comic perplexity. It's that laugh to keep from crying in the face of the system's miseries.The reporter, always advised by a lawyer and specialists in the subject he investigates, has created a company that functions as a wildcard depending on journalistic priorities. Through the not-so-innocent Voltor & Voltor, he participates in market dynamics to understand how it works and how it takes advantage of people. The results are devastating. He already demonstrated it with the first chapter on the real estate world and now with data brokers. With the old follow the money strategy, Tamayo does much more than criticize the system. The reporter still tells us more about the human condition.