May I say that I love your use of GAFAM. I always thought FAANG was silly and Netflix was not like the others and was included just to make a good acronym

If I'm not mistaken FAANG is more about the Silicon Valley (and the people that might be interested in living/working there). Meanwhile GAFAM is more from the point of view of the users, also Netflix#, as a non-US online presence is pretty new, and let's face it, is only about a specific kind of entertainment - one might then add Valve/Steam as well !

It does bother me when politicians say GAFA and leave out Microsoft (but not Apple??)

#Netflix did play an important part in adding DRM to the Web specifications...

FAANG for top pay, GAFAM for global dominance?

I agree with the company choices, but the spelling of the acronym worries me that it will be read or intended by some as "gay fam". Particularly since the usage as a generic insult makes semantic sense for disparaging a group of closely related companies...

(I guess it's not the only slur it has to avoid with that letter combination though.)

Trying to boycott any service that uses reCAPTCHA is pretty impractical, as well. Lots of stuff also uses the Google hosted AJAX libraries.

Right. I tend to forget about it because for the most part you only get reCAPTCHaed when creating a new account...

Does AWS perform end user tracking?

We don't know for sure.