"Corporate surveillance", data selling, and internet privacy concerns are somewhat overblown, at least for now. People will use hypotheticals or worst case scen

"Corporate surveillance", data selling, and internet privacy concerns are somewhat overblown, at least for now. People will use hypotheticals or worst case scenarios to paint inaccurate view of systems that sometimes don't even really exist. Creating fingerprints out of metadata is actually much, much harder to do in practice and at scale than you would think. And fingerprints have a much shorter useful half-life than you would think - 48 hours or less if you are on a smartphone. And the problem scales exponentially the bigger the dataset you are dealing with. Cramming in more and more datasets actually makes weaker connections. And the data available in data brokerages are garbage and riddled with inaccuracies. Your old AOL account from 12 years ago is doing more to gum up these systems than you realize. Even if these systems were as robust as they are sometimes portrayed, all of the investment and decision making is being handled by some Marketing Executive named Brent or something who thinks a spreadsheet is too technical and doesn't think much harder than "let's target this ad to young mothers". There's a reason you still see dumb, out-of-place ads even by the most accomplished tech companies.