The "most common outcome" is probably a superficial way to analyze this. Considering all this surveillance is being done in a pretty underhanded way (else why s

The "most common outcome" is probably a superficial way to analyze this. Considering all this surveillance is being done in a pretty underhanded way (else why so many dark UX patterns?), and it is basically impossible to get the full picture (are FB, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc going to allow audits of the data they collect?), and companies cannot stop lying to their advertisers (e.g. fake video views), to governments (the lie that FB + Whatsapp data cannot be mapped to each other), to people (getting children to click on innocuous looking buttons and charging them money), I think the need of the hour is a wildly speculative analysis of all possible worst case scenarios. Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".