I really appreciate you taking the time to read all of that and I appreciate your supportive reply.
Preserving one's privacy to the fullest extent should be one of the main characteristics of a well-informed citizenry and not an excuse to demonize people who exercise their rights to withhold private information from entities that have no business obtaining that private information.
It's too easy today for information to be collected, profiles built, and those profiles used to silently discriminate against a person or a group of people who have something in common. There is limited or no accountability in the system since many of these capabilities evolved much faster than any regulatory framework could. Once the money started flowing in the data collection space, it acted to restrict the pace of regulatory development since some of those monies were spent to lobby individuals or groups who had the ability and the responsibility to protect privacy rights.
Those of us normal people out here who all contributed to the widening of the data stream by signing up as users of these predatory apps and services are the ultimate losers, having effectively ceded control of our own privacy rights to the extent that we can all be easily profiled, monitored, and predictive tools can be configured to allow any new business relationship to be an adversarial relationship where a profile of the new customer informs the service provider about how they should treat the new customer in order to maximize profits from that individual.
It's wrong. It's predatory. It's an unfortunate consequence of the selfish greed that has become an acceptable lifestyle choice for many in the software industry.
But, here I sit. I'm old and I ramble and at the end of the day my words are weak signal in a high background noise stream that looks exciting to the adventurous ones too inexperienced to understand the risks they ask us all to accept.