Vacuuming up and selling consumer data is not new though, companies have been doing this since before big tech took over.
The Hank Show https://www.amazon.com.au/Hank-Show-House-Painting-Drug-Runn...
The East American NSA is ecstatic to get 100% of the data that Google () is able to collect.
() and Meta, and Microsoft and Apple and ...
>Between 2015 and 2022, Google spent an average of $14.9 million a year(new window) on lobbying
This number is a LOT lower than I expected. I wonder if there's an uncovered budget for defending itself from suits which works as a kind of pseudo-lobbying.
But they don't get in jail.
People keeping on saying that cliché that like it is somehow profound or a great statement of injustice. When saying it just really just shows that they don't understand that corporations are basically people by transitive property.
This is done for a very good reason because not doing so allows for all the myriad abuses through the back door if corporations were declared "not people".