- want the convenience - are not willing to pay for it - and have gone out of your way to avoid doing your research on how this thing works
== it's on you
but i'm not saying this to blame people really, i want people who are in this position to take responsibility for themselves and look up wtf is (for example) google doing and how is it free, then choose if they're ok with that (and stop complaining) or are not (and quit it). Enough people leaving Gmail will absolutely make a dent in how Google thinks. I'm optimistic about this. More people are waking up to the technological-slavery we're living in.
Because it's subsidized by their massive advertising business? They don't need to be this invasive to keep that up.
And they track paying customers too.
It's why in this circumstance I am pro regulation on the adtech industry, as I feel it is the only way to protect people who don't see the dangers. Similar to how regulation is the only way we get ethical food production at such a large scale. When systems get too big, past regular human scale and on to conglomerate scale, it's hard for the average person to see and understand the whole system and its harmful factors.
Thanks for the considered reply by the way.
The consequences are clear to US but we know what to care about, there are teenagers on Facebook, Instagram, anbd Google services. Do you really think they understood the implications of lifelong digital surveillance? Not to mention the thousands of smaller tracking and advertising companies that bottom-feed in the background without so much as a peep. Your behavior lives in the databases of companies you've never heard of before, and they sell it for pennies such is their value of your privacy.
You probably consented to Facebook having access to your photographs in order to do the business you expected them to do with it, such as show it to others in your friends group. Did you anticipate them using your face in advertisements? Did you expect them to run ML algorithms on them in order to suck out advertising interests, did you anticipate the use of your data to form cohorts that allow you to be advertised at by companies you've never heard of?
Depending on when you signed up, you couldn't have, because half of these things didn't even exist when many of us gave them consent. Now think of the billions of users these companies have that don't even know what the word cohort means, and your position is essentially that well they don't know they should be mad, so it's fine to exploit them.