re: #13 Charles Johnson

Exactly.

The reality is that a lot of this is just plain old fashioned marketing. Advertising. In the end, if the privacy advocates have their way and end all these practices it will mean the end of a lot of free content. For instance, if Twitter didn’t do scanning of Tweets, because of privacy, the only way it could stay afloat would be as a subscription service. Of course the counter argument to this would be the utopians who would then say that internet content should be paid for by the state.