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.
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-...
> 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.