It's not that tracking that finally put the fox among the chickens, it's the use to which the data was put. I think to the extent that most people thought about it at all they assumed that they'd just get more invasive advertising. Maybe the read about a girl's parents finding out she was pregnant or something like that.
I agree, but I think you're stopping well short of the natural conclusion here that seems inevitable for anybody thinking more than 10 seconds about the issue.
Data is (mostly) free, ubiquitous, and permanent. When you capture data for any reason, it's logically impossible for you to be able to know or control what to what use that data will be put.
I keep seeing situations where extreme examples are used to make the case that data collection is good, healthy, and makes our world a better place. If you were kidnapped, wouldn't you want police to know where you were based on tracking associated with your cell phone? But for every one good example, the universe is literally the limit for the number of ways that same data capture can be used in bad and harmful ways.
Over my lifetime I've consumed a lot of fiction around how people interact with tech. There are a lot of good people who have instrumented up the general public in ways science fiction writers would have never dreamed of only a few decades ago. It seems to me that anybody who's watched The Matrix would think that all of this has gotta have more societal impact than more intrusive advertising.
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps even though they realized what was being captured, they never put together the deep implications, instead thinking it was just about better dancing iphone ads. I don't understand how that could be so, but people seem to have an incredible ability not to see things they don't want to see -- and they love something for nothing.
I'll be honest. I've read enough science fiction and enough warnings from people a lot smarter than myself over the last decade or so to have seen this coming but I didn't. My reaction to the warnings was to think about how much of my own and my family's data I was comfortable letting out and trying to limit our exposure.
What I did not think about much was how I, or society in general, could be affected by other peoples' data and I think other people are reacting similarly.
There's also the political angle. A lot of people are _very_ upset about Trump and the general state of politics in the US today and anything that touches on that gets amplified.
