[Super_Jambo]

At any time in your life has someone been close enough to you to influence you? I don't think anyone can answer no to this honestly, if they could I'd think them quite unfortunate! Really it's nice to have friends and partners who understand what makes us tick. Obviously we would hope these people are trustworthy only using this influence for our own good.

But to suggest that a wife, husband or parent cannot influence our choices is naive. Even if we were perfectly rational actors these people have far too much insight into our inner mind and too much control over what information we observe.

Surveillance capitalism of the type google and facebook are currently trying to engineer is about putting this level of understanding & control over information sources in the hands of people with a massive incentive for you to make bad economic decisions.

With machine learning & big enough data sets it would be surprising if their ability to manipulate you wasn't eventually orders of magnitude better than the average partner or parent. You think playing Go against a top ranked player is harder than feeding lies to your average rube?