Erosion of privacy

Remember when giant Internet companies pretended to care about privacy?

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking

The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry?s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous. In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people?s real names. But until this summer, Google held the line.

?The fact that DoubleClick data wasn?t being regularly connected to personally identifiable information was a really significant last stand,? said Paul Ohm, faculty director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.

?It was a border wall between being watched everywhere and maintaining a tiny semblance of privacy,? he said. ?That wall has just fallen.?

well that's not good.