[dspillett]

> I don't think Meta and Google are to blame here. Other than encouraging us to give them our data unprotected (as well as trying to syphon up as much as they can get their hands on in the background).

That bracketed "as well as" is a 'king huge "other than".

Even your smaller "other than" that is stated as such, is enough to make the premise that they carry no blame seem pretty silly to me.

[kevincox]

Yes. But the bracketed part doesn't apply to this article IIUC because it is talking about chat logs which were "consciously" given. If the article was talking about web history assembled by ad tracking scripts than I can definitely agree that Meta and Google have a large portion of the blame.