While I agree, everyone constantly restating this is not helpful. We should instead ask ourselves what’s about BlueSky is working and what can we learn? For example, I think the threadiverse could benefit from block lists, which auto update with new filter keywords. I’ve seen Lemmy users talk about how much time they spend crafting their filters to get the feed of content they want. It would be much nicer if you could choose and even combine block lists (e.g. US politics).

Yeah back in the day we made sure no matter who you were and what was going on you had the opportunity to hear our take on it Mind you I suppose that still happens thanks to us being a very loud and online people, but having an "America says x" channel in a time where people liked us sure was a good idea

I wouldn't call it unprecedented, just more obvious

And they've been doing it more blatantly and for longer than most tech companies.

It's not a back door, it's just a rear entryway

Did I say that it did? No? Then why the rhetorical question for something that I never stated? Now that we're past that, I'm not sure if I think it's okay, but I at least recognize that it's normalized within society. And has been for like 70+ years now. The problem happens with how the data is used, and particularly abused. If you walk into my store, you expect that I am monitoring you. You expect that you are on camera and that your shopping patterns, like all foot traffic, are probably being analyzed and aggregated. What you buy is tracked, at least in aggregate, by default really, that's just volume tracking and prediction. Suffice to say that broad customer behavior analysis has been a thing for a couple generations now, at least. When you go to a website, why would you think that it is not keeping track of where you go and what you click on in the same manner? Now that I've stated that I do want to say that the real problems that we experience come in with how this data is misused out of what it's scope should be. And that we should have strong regulatory agencies forcing compliance of how this data is used and enforcing the right to privacy for people that want it removed.