An excellent piece of analysis and writing. Especially with the reference material. We have morphed into this environment unsuspecting from the Madison Ave advertising drive for information extracted from sales data and Nielsen ratings to instant extraction of key data from social postings. This has evolved to a partnership between large corp interests and government with the goal of driving outcomes for profit. It is all about profit and power to drive profit from every possible corner of human interaction. We would do ourselves a great favor by returning to cash transactions which insure privacy of individual behavior rather than using cards which are the gateway for every privacy intrusion and online purchasing. It seems an impossible task, The convenience and cost effectiveness of technology has made data mining a vast endeavor to generate evermore profit that is very difficult to eliminate from one's life. No law can put this back in the bottle. We need to truly rethink and self-educate users. It must be bottom up. No top-down solution which inevitably becomes dominated by those seeking power is possible in my opinion. It has to be up to individuals not giving away their information for free which is turned against them by institutions wanting to be paid evermore from one's income.