Here's the problem: many people in tech circles, including HN, passionately argued that their main monetization technique was selling ads, that they were incent

Here's the problem: many people in tech circles, including HN, passionately argued that their main monetization technique was selling ads, that they were incentivized to protect user data. But it has become clear that while they were profiting off of ads, they were also essentially giving away the data they were supposedly protecting. EFF and others sounded the alarm as it was happening but many people here and in other tech forums couldn't believe it was happening in 2009. But now that it's all in the open we're seeing a bit of history rewriting.