Earlier quoted context omitted.
People seem to have the laughable idea that somehow only government censorship is bad, or that corporations aren't capable of censorship in the first place because they're private entities. I mean, yes, the world will look like that if you reduce everything to contractual relationships like libertarians seem to do, but personally I hope we could hold corporations accountable for actions like these. Like it or not, we…
> If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it? Because the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any of several thousand tools. Corporate censorship is entirely under your contr…
Everybody understood implicitly that you only put in your own information. Giving away other people's personal information to a some company for which it is clearly valuable is not considered nice. It's simply not yours to give away. For the few who didn't understand this most companies had this in their terms of service anyway, as there could be legal risks involved.
All those companies are gone now. They are out-competed by a select few very large companies who did everything possible to make it very easy for people to input everyone else's contact information in their database, including making that behaviour default in the software that ships with your phone. In the beginning you could ask people nicely not to input all your personal info in third party phone book services. That's not really possible anymore.
The days when you could practically opt out of these companies are long gone.