1. Subscription products are not reliant on advertising. Payment technologies are not. Neither are ecommerce operations, or in-person services. Just because a f

1. Subscription products are not reliant on advertising. Payment technologies are not. Neither are ecommerce operations, or in-person services. Just because a firm can advertise their products does not mean it is reliant on advertising. A firm advertising is not the same as it having an advertising revenue business model. Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model. 2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana... Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... > "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."