> I don't understand the sinister outlook, especially from people who in other contexts--e.g. cryptography & terrorism--would adamantly claim that technology is

> I don't understand the sinister outlook, especially from people who in other contexts--e.g. cryptography & terrorism--would adamantly claim that technology is neutral and that the net benefit from innovation is with rare exception to the betterment of society. There's no contradiction here. "Technology" in the abstract may be neutral, and specific technologies might even be neutral, but that doesn't mean that specific applications of specific technologies are necessarily neutral. And in this case, we're discussing the lattermost - the ability to market teenagers' feelings of depression[0] to advertisers. That's only neutral if you think that the set of advertisers who might be interested in that information is either a completely unknown set or a set of advertisers that is, on the whole "neutral", after being weighted by their willingness to pay. [0] conflating mildly the DSM-IV diagnostic criterion of 'worthlessness or guilt' with the clinical diagnosis, but nobody's keeping score here