Joseph Cox’s reporting on the geolocation/tracking shit the US Gov buys up really highlights the direct link between consumer tracking (to sell them shit) and government intrusion into privacy.
Please let me know how to buy bulk consumer data from Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/etc-ad platform.
Ad-Tech isn't the ones selling data; they want to be high up in the value chain. Your ISP/phone company _is_ literally selling your geo-location and data (internet) usage.
In 1998 I sat in a meeting at the oldest data broker in the country where someone gleefully explained how they could predict menstrual cycles from consumer purchase data and use that for targeted ads optimized weekly for emotional state and all other known personal preferences. This isn't something invented by FB and Google. They're the noobs in this world.
True, but it was never this granular on this mass of a scale. I remember joking as a kid about the Nielson families that would kill a TV show because they went out to dinner instead of watching TV that night. The extrapolation that was applied to those kinds of numbers were always ripe for bad interpretation. The same thing can be said about polling numbers. The granularity is what makes modern day "ad tech" or tracking in general so damn dangerous in its accuracy