> and not necessarily know where you drive and how often.

They do tough. They know where you refueled/charged your car, hotels you've booked. Not only that, but they also know if you donate money to your local mosque/synagogue, spend just a bit too much at a liquor store, etc.

You can still opt for taking money out of an ATM and and pay by cash to not be tracked by the card company. Meta does not offer the same option

You have to use Meta? I'm not arguing for or against privacy here - just trying to point out that you still have options. It might be a pain to contact loved ones, check in on friends, etc. but so is using an ATM.

"Simply create your own social media company and get all the people you want to keep in contact with to move to it"

When did I say anything like that? You can call or txt to check in on friends.

shadow profiling doesn't care if you directly use Meta products. You're information about your friends, and another example of trends.

Well, then we should re-engineer things so that they don't, or regulate them heavily.

While I am all for privacy, which companies enable the microphone next to your bed and collect personal data with it?

Google Nest? Amazon Alexa? Apple Siri?

At least TikTok definitely uses data somehow from microphones, without any (explicit) consent.

So they've hacked the permissions on the phone?

I don’t know how, I haven’t looked at or reverse engineered the code. What I do know is that topics I discuss with friends and family suddenly appear in the form of ads and user generated content in my FYP, when none of us has done a search or engaged in other online activity associated with them. Sometimes literally while we’re talking.

Isn't this just because they have so much data on you already?

e.g. what are 3 30 year olds in Toronto talking about this saturday? likely the drake concert, winter tires and xmas related things..

Even if your scenario were accurate, it's unlikely their data processing algorithms would pin the conversation down to within the hour of it happening, given that the schedules I keep are not fixed or typical in any way. Also, in my case for some of these, it's exceptionally unlikely given the individuals involved (a 20-something guy and a 40-something guy with odd senses of humor and esoteric interests in a romantic relationship).

Every voice assistant enabled company store voice audio. Some by accident. Some to "make" voice assistant better. Some to do other stuff with it. Your voice is stored for undisclosed time on their servers. It does not have to be stored for long. Unknown contractors look at the footage of your iRobot,tesla.

No regulator will find any proof of anything though, as regular employees will not have access to such crucial data. Regulators will also can be fooled by the maze of interfaces and servers.

There is also incentive for governments to "not see" any wrongdoings of the companies, if they profit from surveillance system.

Ad business is like Palantir in lord of the rings. You do know know who is watching on the other side.

All you have is some "vague" promise from corporations that your data are properly removed.

>Keeping all of the data under one company umbrella

This part of your post is also not correct. What company knows everything about you? There's insurance companies, credit card companies, social media companies... they all have a substantial amount of info about you but they don't all collude to aggregate it.

Do you have evidence that these companies are using the microphones in their devices for tracking? Or that they are using "all your emails" for ad targeting? If not please quit kicking that strawman.

There are real privacy issues here, but this kind of paranoia distracts us from mitigating the actual threats and has us jumping at shadows.