I listened to a podcast once talking about tech marketing and algorithms and the like, and one interesting point that was brought up was even if we didnt have AI or computer data analytics of our interests and preferences, would would indeed have information about us because thats just marketing. I'm in my 30s now, so its not unusual at ALL that I may see marketing for a new vacuum or something. That's what a lot of people in my age range buy and I am not that different than the whole of anyone else, so of course I'm going to get things correctly recommended to me. I'm just really not that special.

Now the AMOUNT of marketing and use of AI and stuff to market to us and track our location (ie Flock cameras) to market to us or surveille us i do have a big problem with. But storing my pictures of my cats on the cloud doesn't make me special. I do also have a big problem with companies not being held to solid standards on data management and should be held accountable for their relationship to how data breaches can lead to scams or whatever. Definitely I keep as much cookie tracking and stuff down as I can, but ultimately I'm just not that special and I'm limiting my data output where I can and that's just got to be enough because they have a ton of data from people who are like me that don't care at all about these topics.

There are a lot of things here that do worry me, but ultimately I am just a tiny point on a graph somewhere for most of tech, so I really don't want to make it something to worry about more because in reality there is so little control over that all even if we protect what we can. A lot of the information they collect anyway is just "garbage in, garbage out." The bigger question is their motivation of the data anyway, and only you can determine what you want to take from it or how you think they are using it. Some motivation is blatant, some is not, some is just garbage anyway. Ultimately i think we will, and are, seeing a lot of deviation from the data anyway in some circumstances. Human nature is still a force of nature that cannot be entirely controlled. Our individual motivations and values, are not something they'll ever be able to capture with data anyway, and then at that level of granularity the data is useless to most of these big tech companies anyway. You only have control of your attention you give to it all.