Surveillance Capitalism is no secret. We all know that companies track us in order to deliver targeted ads and sell us products. What we may not know is the darker side: how many of those companies are tracking us, and how aggresssivey.
It may sound paranoid, but it's actually a credible fact that entire companies exist simply to collect your data and build profiles on you, and in their minds the ends will always justify the means. Often they collect data in ways that range from questionable to straight-up illegal, collecting information that no sane person would willingly consent to, but they do it in ways you can't detect. When your deepest, most personal secrets are a data point for a marketing agency, abuse of any kind is only a small step away, as could be seen in 2019 when the Egyptian government tracked opponents and activists through phone apps, the Moroccan government spied on the phones of human rights defenders, and the Chinese government hacked Asian telecommunications companies to spy on the Uighur, a minority Muslim ethnic group living in China.
It sounds far-fetched, like something from a dystopian sci-fi movie, but just a few of the factual methods of data collection include using high-pitched tones that only electronic devices (aka phones) can hear to report how many people are watching a TV show, collecting sale information, tracking your search history, tracking your car as you drive through the real world, tracking your phone as you browse the store to see where you spend the most time, collecting your DNA from family heritage testing services, selling your information to public data websites, government agencies selling your driver's license information, and more.
"Wow," you may say, "that's intense. But why should I care? I have nothing to hide."