Tech's most egregious violations of user privacy

If an enterprise provides a service, it's their responsibility to properly secure it. If they made the decision to use experimental technology or to transfer everything into the cloud, that's their business decision and they should be liable for it.

Keep in mind I had JavaScript turned on when I visited the page and it was using an 'infinite scroll' mechanism to show me the next article, so you need to watch statements like: "The last item in this list"

Data collected by Facebook was used to radicalize USA population looking into their political preferences and organizing groups in the extreme of the spectrum.

Political ads were used to show lies like "Europe, is negotiating to open borders with Turkey" to people depending on their political orientation during the "Brexit" vote by also Russia.

Targetted ads by hostile countries without any electoral supervision are running amok in social networks as ads are private and personalized.

I think you can look at china's social credit system as examples: They use clues from all kinds of collected personal data to assign personalized ratings to people and purposely make their life easier or harder based on those ratings. In the end, the goal is not about collection but about control: Drive people into or away from certain behaviors with unprecedented prevision.

The US is less centralized, but I cam easily see a more diffuse version of that emerging there as well. There are many businesses offering personalized scoring already and a large market of customers - you could imagine using it by insurances to adjust your premium (or determine when to cancel a contract), employers to vet candidates, landlords to vet tenants, etc. You don't necessarily need a central authority controlling it.

(Slightly OT part follows)

Other than that, I think the privacy debate is sometimes a symptom of a deeper problem that, I think, is less talked abou as of now: Direct control. With more and more services - and physical goods - being depended on the cloud, the service providers gain a level of control that is unprecedented. 15 years ago, we all were joking that Windows 98 would secretly talk back to Microsoft - today it's commonly accepted practice that devices, appliactions and OSses constantly send telemetry to their vendors and can at any point change functionality if the vendor says so. We're at a point where, it's normal to run experiments on parts of your user base to optimize retention or learn about the emotional effects of a newsfeed. We can have Elon Musk increase the battery capacity of all Teslas in operation in an instant because he is concerned by a hurricane. Or we can have Amazon removing e-books that had already been purchased from all readers because they have a dispute with the publisher. Not to mention that software and device manufacturers in general can restrict in increasingly precise ways how and to what effect their products may be used.

So far, you get occasional public outrage about those things, but their seems to be little legal protection against this. I do hope this will change at some point.

If I was allowed to collect data, as what should I frame it, if not "improving user experience"?

It’s not like that, though. You pay for MoviePass up front each month. Cancelling means you don’t want to pay for next month, but you are still able to use it for this month. Deleting the app would just be throwing money away.

They’re exploiting users who want to get fair value from their existing purchase.