> but the only scenarios you provide to argue your case come from your imagination.

And in what concrete scenarios in Europe, has someone's data at say, Google, Facebook, or Amazon actually harmed them? Is it more or less than the people who had a bad reaction to a vaccination? (~1 in 1 million)

> In fact most small business owners do not have the knowledge and time to effectively market using online advertising.

True, the holy grail would be pay for customer acquisition, only pay for ads that work and convert. Which would allow businesses on the margin to precisely estimate their CA costs, and whether the LV justifies it. That is only possible with some kind of end-to-end information, from click to purchase.

>A client of mine leases offices from WeWork. All the offices have glass walls, so you can really see everything about a business.

(Small irony that you're opposite to surveillance capitalism, but as a capitalist, you used access to your client's workspace to gather intel on others :) )

When I say small business, I'm not talking about people trying to ship products, like your WeWork example, I'm talking brick-and-mortar, your local Italian eatery, or French bakery.

> Publishing worked fine (in fact, in many ways better) before the surveillance capitalism oligopoly, and it will survive and thrive once the surveillance capitalism oligopoly is dismantled.

Demonstrably false. The amount of free information I have access to at the touch of a button is exponentially greater than it was when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. A library in the 80s didn't have "digital subscriptions", they had "subscriptions" to actual paper magazines. And libraries in poor neighborhoods don't exactly operate like a library in Manhattan or Palo Alto.

It's easy to sweep away things as working "fine" if you don't have the experience of only having a public library that stocks few books, doesn't have "digital databases", and to access more information, you have to take a bus far away.

Billions of people now have access to almost the sum total of human knowledge in an instant, except the truly evil people who keep publicly funded scientific papers behind expensive paywalls. This didn't work "fine" 30 years ago, raising the barrier to information to a level that only the truly dedicated would put in the effort to get it.

People who were born after the creation of the internet and of less modest economic means I think have a different perspective of just how hard it used to be to obtain information, especially on demand. I taught myself programming from a ripped up book on 6502 assembly programming, and a VIC-20 register map. That was all I could obtain, and even finding where to find a library that had other books I might want was an epic quest for a child, something thanksfully, today's kids don't have to worry about.

But you have to ask yourself how we got from zero in the 1980s, to trillions of web pages today. Someone directly paid for that out of pocket, and it wasn't me, and it wasn't publicly funded.

_That_ is the positive social externality I was talking about in my original post. It's easy to lose sight of the bonanza of riches you have today that was invisibly funded and not understand how it was funded, nor what model can replace it. It's all too easy for people to bring out the pitchforks and torches over theoretical harm and completely ignoring the concrete benefits since they aren't paying for it.