That’s a fair stance to have. I agree that the general trend of privacy violations across all industries is concerning, and it’s reasonable to extrapolate that it’s going to get worse. At the same time, it’s important to gauge what is presently possible in order for these extrapolations to be reasonable, so we can appropriately prepare for what these advertising corporations would do next.

For example, I think it’s very likely that the government and megacorporations will collude further to harvest as much personal data and metadata in the name of “national security” — see the revelation that the government gag-ordered Google and Apple to keep hush about the harvesting of metadata from push notifications. I don’t think, even with the advancements in AI, that we will have smart speaker and phone companies deploying a dystopian, horrifying solution of mass surveillance to a scale that would make even the CCP blush. Maybe it would be possible within the next 50 years, but not now with how expensive AI software/hardware is right now, and especially not in the past.

In principle, I do agree that riling up people through outrageous claims of privacy violations is a good thing purely to spread the message, but I think the strongest weapon we have for actual change is legal precedent. We need a court to strictly and firmly tell these companies, and companies in the future, and government agencies looking to infringe upon our rights, that harvesting the private, sensitive information of its users without consent is objectively wrong. A court case where the factual basis of the situation is dubious at best (for example, the context of this whole “marketing company is listening to you” claim is confusing and questionable) isn’t going to help us here, because these companies with handsomely-paid lawyers are just going to say “well, that’s not what the situation factually is, it’s __.”