[stephbu]

I spent a couple of decades in big-tech, and of-that did adtech for about 5yrs - we captured, aggregated, cooked out activity streams from billions of toolbar, browser, and beacon events per day, for real-time, long and short-term user profiles for around a couple of hundred million people - primarily for feeding the ad-exchange behavioral targeted ads. Back then about 80% of the active internet users. This was a huge business even back then - billions.

Since then the world and his wife have captured data and inserted telemetry beacons everywhere. Consider how many services you use that are today subsidized by “anonymized” selling/trading/sharing/merging user event streams - the TV your watching, your cellphone provider selling user behaviour data, even your ISP is selling your DNS lookups - they’re all at it now. Worse, mobile has made it much easier to install platform frameworks that offer developer features in return for data-collection such as location, user profile etc.

I don’t think it’s overblown - that “anonymity” isn’t that anonymous when you add enough dimensions - you just haven’t seen how massive the data broker business is.

[caconym_]

My point is that the companies usually referred to as "Big Tech", e.g. Google, FB, Apple, etc., are generally not the ones participating in this kind of unrestrained exchange of PII and sensitive personal data for money. They generally keep their user data on their own servers, and use it to power ad targeting platforms.

The things you are talking about (e.g. smart TVs, cell providers, ISPs) are the things I am saying are actually bad. For some reason they don't get nearly as much attention, despite being far worse.