Big data and user profiling is a somewhat recent trend, if you consider the age of the internet. It used to be that free web services merely showed you ads, and

Big data and user profiling is a somewhat recent trend, if you consider the age of the internet. It used to be that free web services merely showed you ads, and people got used to that. I don't think most of them have realized just by what order of magnitude things have escalated, how much information they are making public outside the immediate app and connected friends and how they have become a product for these enterprises to sell.