It's only bringing in several billions of dollars in revenue for Microsoft every year.

The "Twitter Files" proved nothing meaningful, but go off!

The problem is that social media platforms are designed to suck you into echo chambers, and if you hear something enough and from enough likeminded people, it becomes truth to you. That's why it's dangerous.

>We had something similar to what happened in the Capitol, except nobody died here. It was ridiculous to see.

The same fascist ideologies that blossomed under Trump also blossomed under Jair Bolsonaro. Trump and Bolsonaro are like two peas in a pod, so it wasn't the least bit surprising to me to see a similar attempted insurrection in Brazil.

I'm sorry what you got from my comments was that I'm personally worried about any of this.

OK, sounds good to me. But how does that mitigate any of the concerns people seem to have with online privacy/tracking?

It's very likely that, if they are not already, some (if not all) those email addresses will be unified under a singular identifier in some sort of identity graph that is being used for advertising targeting and attribution.

That's not the point here. If your junkmail address is linked to other addresses or data points in an identity graph, advertisers/data providers will still be able to pool you accordingly. The vast majority of this has little to do with bad actors trying to invade your privacy to spy on you; rather, it's about whether or not your presence on these sites can be monetized in some way.

I know this is sarcasm, but I do want to make an important distinction: This type of privacy issue doesn't really relate to governmental use. If the government wanted your browsing history and internet activity, they wouldn't really have to go through publishers and data providers.

Not for nothing, but Facebook and Google tracking practices are a moot point in the United States. Since 2017, it's been legal for ISPs to sell browsing data in the U.S. (other developed countries rightly prohibit that), so all of their browsing privacy is gone even before they ever get picked up by a Google or Facebook tracking pixel.

What's even more ironic is The New York Times wants your email address, in part, because they want to use it for advertising practices exposed in this article.

In the advertising world, "leverage first-party data" (i.e., use people's email addresses and other contact info) is a phrase that has been repeated to the point of cliche when talking about how to adapt to the end of the third-party cookie. NYT and all these other sites work with ad exchanges that rely on their signed-in user base to target audiences.

Working in advertising, I don't think it's ever really used for anything nefarious, but I understand why people think it's shady.

Absolutely, but the point I'm trying to make is that both Google and Microsoft cut product lines that have no viable path to profitability.

Let's see...

Windows Phone, Zune, Groove Music (formerly Zune), Kinect, Silverlight, Microsoft Band

These are just some of the big things Microsoft nixed in the last decade.

The old enterprise software they keep alive for years and years is generally only alive because enterprises are paying Microsoft hefty fees to do so. There's a reason why support Windows 3.1 for embedded systems ended in 2008.