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Comment by SauntSolaire | Hacker News Reader

> who then publish your demographics, preferences, history, and mental state on the global markets.

Is there any evidence this actually happens? Or are we just going based on vibes?

No vibes and there is voluminous evidence, eg many links here: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-does-google-track-me-even-when... as well as Google Takeout itself. Oh and I forgot location data and shopping records, those are huge. So the collected data about you are well documented.

Given the data, why would a trillion dollar company leave money on the table? Their shareholders DEMAND they monetize it. There are few forces against this.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...

Given the 2.095 trillion reasons why this should happen, and few reasons it shouldn't, you should demand evidence it DOESN'T happen. Presumption of innocence is backwards when there are market forces.

For most of it you can just go to the customer facing part of ad services and see these as distinct chooseable options, for mental state you could hand wave it away as "do we really know the mental state of someone who closely followed political news and has been searching for air tickets and migration processes since Nov 6?"

Read any of the “I asked site X for my personal data” articles to get an idea of what’s going on.

I asked Google for my personal data and they had almost nothing on me. But I have opted out of every form of data collection so it makes sense to me.

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