> One now notorious story about successful digital targeting of advertising is
the story of a father who received advertising for babies only to discover that his daughter was pregnant. The algorithm knew before she had told him.[44]

You could do this with supermarket loyalty cards, which here in the UK were introduced in the 90's, but using other meta data, namely dietary changes.

Water companies can spot it with hormones detected in waste water, then you can narrow it down depending on where the sample was taken and what type of properties are around plus time of day window of sample, but living in a big tower block generally offers a level of privacy from that intrusion.

There is so much meta data we give away, early adopters or dedicated followers of fashion, are the easiest to manipulate though, so that could be latest car, smartphone, laptop, computer game, clothes, we just give away way too much without realising it.

Only now when you consider device fingerprinting eg https://browserleaks.com/ and more, states setting up fake/popup advertising companies to access the data from the likes of Google adwords and other networks who collect alot of data in the first place and present it to advertisers to bid on, nobody has any real privacy online, even VPN's users can still be detected, if you noticed a vpn going slow, lets just some people have the ability to throttle your communication over a vpn to work out who you are!

Cambridge Analytica was spun out from the British Military, which might be why Hollywood is fixated on British Spies! I think Hollywood is trying to tell the world something.

I think that sums up some of my knowledge.

Edit:
> There is no way for any individual to tackle the surveillance economy.[73]

Yes there is, but they need to be aware of the panopticon, so that means peoples cctv in their homes, see Shodan.io, be aware of peoples normal routines to blend in when possible, like neighbours who use the internet intermittently on a device, new neighbours preferably immigrants/refugees can help the most here as the spooks need to establish patterns, have a mobile phone where you can control what cell towers you connect to, there is/was an app on android that let you do this, I guess this is what would be called spycraft.

>Furthermore, the algorithms being used are opaque and not widely understood.
You can troll algorithms to establish what data sharing is taking place behind the scenes, knowledge of the advertising networks bidding process can help here. Always work on the basis that your (device) fingerprint is like a supercookie.
With sufficient resources, you can disappear into the crowd but most people are just not that interested in privacy, because who would they get their special offers like a heavily discounted products?

An example, replace vehicle battery, with privacy you are looking at nearly £600, without privacy you can get the price down to just over £100, and thats simply from whether you wipe cookies during/after a browsing session or not and what a search engine gives you. Same search terms, just one with cookies always enabled and one without.

Privacy is expensive but its now possible to start quantifying the cost.