[rprospero]

What I find extra-annoying about the tracking is that it stopped pretending to be helpful. I remember chatting with my spouse on Google Messenger around 2012. We were discussing what to have for dinner when whatever the google assistant was called at the time popped up a message

"Traffic is unusually heavy right now due to an accident on Kirkwood. If you want to pick up a pizza from Avers and be home by six, you should leave work in the next seven minutes."

Was it creepy? Hell yes, but at least it was useful. The companies haven't cut back on spying on me, but, in an effort to pretend that they aren't, they've stopped sharing the useful information with me. Instead, they keep it to themselves to mine for the perfect car advertisement to send to a guy who doesn't have a license.

[nonrandomstring]

Accidentally revealing your intelligence gathering capability is a famous trade-off problem. The Allies in WW2 occasionally had to let a ship get sunk rather than make it obvious that the Enigma had been cracked [0]. Plausible alternatives are usually assured to be in place, for example radar in the above case, or parallel construction in modern law enforcement.

Bigtech are likely increasingly careful about making it too obvious that certain technologies (for de-anonymisation and correlation) are in use. Most people will still believe in unlikely coincidences rather than sophisticated behavioural analysis and covert monitoring of audio systems etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma