> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect Because "respect" in this case costs money. And because they can, since pre

> why do they treat their customers who make them their money with such disrespect Because "respect" in this case costs money. And because they can, since precisely the transaction is so tacit. It might take a few more decades until we can make explicit the nature of data and surveillance based transactions. Imagine if your grocery store's loyalty card was used in a way that required saying "do you want to sell the information of what you bought today for $x.xx?" or "you are paying %x more today for this product because we were able to calculate it with the data you or people like you provided in the past, which shows you would pay for it". I think it is obvious the billions of profit ads businesses are making is not matching their value to the humanity or the productivity of the company. It is a monopolistic game with economies of scale on these little externalities, unpriced transactions that creates that sweet margin. In that scale, you are almost nothing, while "respecting" you doesn't work well. Unless there is PR pressure or a reduction to product usage, there is absolutely no incentive to be better in that regard, while there is all the incentive to grow the userbase, grow the margins, grow the surveillance.