I remember when cable first came out and had no ads at all. That was its major selling point besides clear reception without rooftop aerials and rabbit ears. Then ads came showing you what you was going to air later on the same channel, then ads came showing you what would air on other channels, then finally came the ads for cars and laundry powder. Cable TV started out as a great deal, but it became another tech disappointment with animated station logos, spying on what you were watching, and pop-up ads covering 25% of the screen during shows.
> Think about how much leverage industries like health care hold over people's lives, cause bankruptcies, and then compare that to tech products collecting usage analytics.
Well... healthcare bankrupting sick people is a uniquely American failure, tech being used to spy on everyone allows for far more control over people's lives. Look at china and their "social credit system". America already has it's own version of the same only instead of tracking how good a citizen you are it tracks how good a consumer you are. In china your social credit score could get you banned from trains and planes. In the US your Your consumer credit score determines how companies treat you, what they'll tell you their policies are, what services you get offered and how much you pay for things.
The effects of surveillance capitalism on our everyday lives is expanding all the time, but you're not allowed to know about it. You just see the bill from your insurance company, you don't know that you're paying more this year because people in your zip code spent more money at fast food restaurants. You just see the rejection letter from a job you applied to, you don't get to know that the company reviewed your social media accounts and recent spending habits and thought you spent too much money on alcohol. You just get to wait on hold while calling for service, but you aren't allowed to see that you've been moved to the bottom of the queue because they've used your cell phone number to see that you make less money in a year than the other people calling in.
Benevolence is not a feature of tech, it's a feature of people and so far they've mostly decided they want to use tech to control you. FOSS is the best hope we have right now, but it's still running on locked down hardware and processors that are controlled by a very small number of companies which have been backdoored and used to collect data on us as well.