The world is at peril, and full of people who are suffering. I can easily call an oil company evil, because they are burning the earth. I can call a food manufacturer that knowingly puts poison in their products to save a few bucks evil. I cannot bring myself to call Facebook or Google evil because they are configuring computers to display ads that introduce people to products they might want to buy. It’s really a triumph of human progress that they have managed to amass such wealth while causing so little harm.
The harm these companies might cause is primarily in the future. This is still the sunny phase where they have not been incorporated into some Orwellian system (pardon me, google tried really hard in China but got stopped for now)
Upvoted, but at the same time it's worth considering that right now, we have little idea how to account for the harm of the concentrations of personal data that both companies (among others) currently have. Even in the context of marketing, but more pressingly, once it becomes accessible to actors whose intentions may be either more malevolent, or simply up for sale to malevolent actors (e.g., Cambridge Analytica). You're speaking of poisoned products; what happens when data-intensive psych profiling is used to taint or outright poison discourse?
