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> As blue_beetle said: "If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."

Also if you are paying for it. See cable TV, magazines, cell phones, etc.

The way I'm formulating it these days is: if you can be measured, you can be exploited. Observe, explain, predict, and control---the goals of the scientific method---all work on people too. You might say that people aren't linear systems, which is true---unless they act like them.

yup; a specific individual is hard to predict but large groups of people behave in probablistically predictable ways, and that's useful information

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