“Getting to know you, getting to know all about you.” It’s nice lyrics and what’s become a not-so-nice business practice. From J.B. Shurk at gatestoneinstitute.org:
Almost all private companies have now entered the “spy business.”
In the old days, television and movie studios wanted to know what you watch; today, everybody wants to know what you watch, what you like, what you do, where you go, and with whom you go there. In turn, all this information is ultimately used to manipulate human behavior.
US Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, recently confirmed that state and federal governments regularly purchase Americans’ personal data from private companies, so that they may “spy on and track the activities of U.S. citizens.” No kind of personal information is off-limits. Government agents use data brokers to collect information on an individual’s GPS location, mobile phone movements, medical prescriptions, religious affiliations, sexual practices, and much more. It is the type of total surveillance, Rep. Rodgers alleged, that “you would expect out of the Chinese Communist Party surveillance state, not in America.” Yet it is all arguably legal or in an unregulated gray zone.
“A report published last month by the Brennan Center for Justice found at least twelve overlapping DHS programs for tracking what Americans are saying online,” demonstrating that the DHS had “veered from its original counterterrorism mission into tracking social and political movements and monitoring First Amendment-protected activity of American citizens.” — Senator Rand Paul, April 18, 2023.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
― Benito Mussolini
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