[nonwifehaver3]

The dragon with its hoard of gold (private user data) is a great description of Facebook and Google's regulatory goals. As Maciej has also put it, "privacy is an essential right — your most intimate moments should be kept strictly between you and Google".

The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.

[simonebrunozzi]

"Brave New World" is about a coercion that you don't see as malevolent; what you are depicting is more in line with "1984".

I think the "Brave New World" approach is the most likely to happen / is starting to happen / has been happening for a while now.

[cm2012]

Google or FB don't matter for this stuff, since the government goes straight to the ISPs (which covers incognito mode, etc)

[hoseja]

But ISPs have access to much less detailed data. Or do you think encryption is trivially broken by them?