It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine.
Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism.
It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast.
Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine.
It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.