That begs the question, IMHO: Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore ma

That begs the question, IMHO: Saying market analysis is nothing new is similar to the argument that police examining phone records is nothing new, therefore mass collection of metadata is not a problem. The changes in technology make the analysis associated with marketing far more powerful - with orders of magnitude more targets, more data, and more analysis applied to each individual - to the point where there is a risk to society of mass privacy violations and mass manipulation. And when this risk is applied to the political sphere, it becomes much more consequential. As the the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie was quoted in the article, it was used by "Steve Bannon [to] build his insurgency and build the alt-right". Do we want this power, and the people who control it, to control our countries and societies? Probably people buying LL Bean jackets didn't know it would be used in an attempt to manipulate them. I'm not dismissing the fact that big questions remain: How effective is the manipulation (the biggest question in IT, IMO), and what makes some manipulation dangerous and some just regular persuasion? But these are very serious problems that might undermine things as fundamental as liberty and democracy.