Unless you're someone who gets really anxious/paranoid about being tracked by a BigCo, I can't imagine it making an outsized impact. The weirdest thing might be how that activity tracking is used to try and sell stuff to you, and sometimes that advertising is pretty compelling as a result. But I'm not sure how that compares to the more active influence of "influences" and social media across the larger population.

> Unless you're someone who gets really anxious/paranoid about being tracked by a BigCo, I can't imagine it making an outsized impact.

I can't say anything with absolute numbers but subreddits such as privacy, privacytools, degoogle, minimalism, and alike places have seen massive growth in recent years and I regularly find people (especially teenagers) who are severely affected by this.

So I wonder how long will it take google or any other tech companies to take an opt in approach to tracking.

When you know you are being watched, your behavior changes, for better or worse [1] [2].

But it's true it is a bit different for BigCo. Not only they watch, they also have an active role by modifying what you see - e.g. the ads and news they display [3].

Does this qualify as "outsized impact" or do you want moar?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

[2] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/the-watchers

|3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...

> Descriptions of the well-known and remarkable effect, which was discovered in the context of research conducted at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant, turned out to be fictional.

> Workers experienced a series of lighting changes in which productivity was said to increase with almost any change in the lighting. This turned out not to be true.

> ...a series of changes in work structure were implemented (e.g., changes in rest periods) in a group of five women. But this was a methodologically poor, uncontrolled study that did not permit any firm conclusions to be drawn.[4]

> This interpretation was dubbed "the Hawthorne effect," although the data does not support that view.

I guess that's par for the course.

The original study was indeed subpar, but follow-up research research confirms the intuition that you are not the same when you know someone (something?) is watching you, as the "See Also" section demonstrates.

The problem with advertising overlaps wkth the problem with social media -- harming people's self-image to pressure them into "retail therapy".