I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit.

Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.

Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/

At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.