You may be a little oblivious to how Facebook has "like" buttons, which are also javascript tracking beacons, on basically every site online. Well, "Facebook"

You may be a little oblivious to how Facebook has "like" buttons, which are also javascript tracking beacons, on basically every site online. Well, "Facebook" doesn't have them there, the site owners include them willingly, serving up the privacy of their users in exchange for "engagement." Billions of tracking beacons spread around the Internet give Facebook a real time click-by-click bread-cumb trail of almost your entire thought process and Internet experiential reality (reminder: use uBlock Origin with everything enabled). Google has the email of probably over a billion people. Sure, there are safeguards to prevent employee naughtiness (supposedly there are now, after years of "lol, i'm a sysadmin and i'll read the email of my ex" abuse), but if they wanted, they could do a lot of damage and there's nobody capable of stopping them. Heck, let's not even include google analytics. Sure, they say there is a "corporate firewall" between the global analytic record of every web user alive and the rest of the company, but we just have to trust them. Trust Google. Trust Facebook. Trust VW. It's only software created by and data retained by for-profit corporations in constant competition who must meet growth targets or else the market will punish them. What could go wrong? (Amazon doesn't have a bird in this fight.) Old quote (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI&t=36m00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI&t=36m00): "In some respects, it's pretty clear that we are sleepwalking into nightmares. Absolutely. And the most distressing thing is how hard that is to explain to anybody. The way in which people will give away their personal details in much the way as in the child history books about colonialism. You had native chieftains who handed over mineral rights in return from some baubles from some canny imperialist. All that stuff is happening but it's very hard to explain to anybody."