I recently finished the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." If you *really* want to understand Google - the real Google, not the PR spun version - then this book is a must read.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

A lot of this is described in the book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by author Professor Shoshana Zuboff[1]. There’s also a good documentary on Netflix (I forget which, I think it’s ‘The Great Hack’[2]), explaining how the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal utilised personal data and more importantly behaviour.

They’re just scarily good at predicting what you are going to do. They’re not listening in. It’s far scarier/more insidious than that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

[2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542

It's a long often too verbose read by "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is unforgiving in its detailing of the past, and relentless in its fear of what the future likely holds.

Most people seem to say "oh I know they're collecting data." Unfortunately they don't - likely can't - grasp the depth and breadth. And the motive? Most will never make it that far.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism rips off the bandaid, one greepy greedy power move at a time.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

Privacy isn't damage. Privacy is a threat to profits, it is a form of competition. The less competition, the more freedom to suck up more data and repackage it as product.

It's a long,layered, and sometimes difficult read, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism thoroughly lines up the stones and turns them over. After hearing this, I was obligated to buy it , and read it.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

I am always so surprised when I read articles like this by people in the "ad tech" space by the amount of sheer entitlement to people's attention and data. Apple making this move is treated as if they were denying access to a natural resource, like Nestle putting a fence around your local lake and selling you the water.

Ads are not inherently good, consumers don't need them, and ad companies don't have any right whatsoever to our attention or data. If it can be abused, it will be, and Google and Facebook have shown you can make tens of billions off of personal data and attention. To me it's fundamentally immoral. To see the terrifying endgame to all this, check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff.

I'd like to highlight that 60% of apps isn't synonymous with 60% of students. That is, if a dominant app(s) is used by e.g., 80% of students then the impact on privacy and such is even higher.

Full disclosure: I recently finished reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." While I understood the gist of the situation, the book shifted my paranoia even further.

You should read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=swMo1sK5ntk

After reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its many examples of how optimistic psychological studies have been misused by the ad industry to make better ads, I can’t help but think about how this may fall into the same category.

The models used in this study probably measure your mental health along one or more axes that start on “perfectly fine” and ends up at “problematic”. Knowing where someone falls (within the range of what’s ethically acceptable to push ads to) could be very profitable to Facebook and Google. Scanning for mental health problems could also provide them with an excuse to get users to hand over their data.

Note that the author of the review criticizes Levine's characterizations, not the facts contained. The same information can be found in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Or in this NBC News article: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/thousands-contracts-h.... Here's the data on techinquiry: https://techinquiry.org/SiliconValley-Military/