> They don't understand that these companies have PhD educated ML data scientist getting paid outrageous salaries mine your behavior and influence it
What I think is a fallacy is that _any_ of us even understands exactly what that means. The data science crap is (from what I hear from people in the industry) is mostly hype.
> I will never, ever blame the user for being exploited.
It's not exactly exploitation if the user is aware of what's happening and change causes them only inconvenience. People don't even turn off GPS on their phone even though they only actively use positioning like once a week just to avoid the inconvenience of having to go to privacy settings and turn it on/off, basically they'd rather be tracked the whole time just to save 3 seconds. If you do this you're not being exploited, you're willingly accepting this transaction. It's their loss.
The thing that every single person can see is that these companies don't have the customer's interest primarily in mind. Google is not giving free stuff because they're generous (and they shouldn't be, people should understand that companies exist to make money by "supposedly" providing value). Their standard position is hypocritical. Amazon argues for higher min wage not because they care about welfare, but because they want to prevent competition from even a 1% chance of gaining a tiny share in some market, as long as min wage can only be paid by Amazon and not some random small business, they're winning.
Our problem is not that companies are doing any of this. It's that when EA did that whole gambling/surprise-box crap, people complained and complained for months, but a lot of those same people STILL played the same stuff and bought stuff from the company. This leads to the conclusion that people don't want anything to be different, but they like to complain and have moral high standing.