Tries to make good points but indulged in so much hyperbole that I had to stop reading. Words like "stolen", "lie", "heist", etc. I do think there's a case to b

Tries to make good points but indulged in so much hyperbole that I had to stop reading. Words like "stolen", "lie", "heist", etc. I do think there's a case to be made that online companies misrepresent to users how they deeply they track them and use their data. But going overboard and pretending that having somebody know some statistics about you in a de-identified and aggregated manner is some heinous invasion of your personal privacy equivalent to someone sitting with a spy camera watching you in your bathroom - that is completely unhelpful in the other direction. There's enormous genuine value in this kind of data. That is, mutual win-win value to consumers and end users and companies that learn to understand the data. At the extreme there are a whole range of diseases where the only real hope of curing them explicitly depends on us gathering enough data to find cures. At a much more subtle level, a rental car company knowing enough about its users to accurately predict when and where they are likely to want cars helps everyone and gets you cheaper prices and better availability. The problem at the moment is that this issue has become recognised as a way to attack advertising based internet companies and is thus being exploited by their competitors. Those competitors don't care whether the baby is thrown out with the bath water - in fact, if the baby goes all the better because it's not an area of strategic advantage for them. So they might as well sabotage all of it to get a bit of commercial advantage, and screw it if consumers and society are the worse off for it. We need to be cognisant that much of the heat around this is created by this being a commercial battle ground and the actual issues are much more nuanced and need more careful thought.