this is not really a "just started doing it" type of thing. google has ALWAYS read anything and everything you hosted with them.
gmail, chrome, cloud storage, anything on your android phone, plus all the 3rd party data they buy and scrape as well such as health/financial records and anything else they can get their hands on.
i personally hate it 100% but i'm sure the rest of the commenters here will just say "apple/MS/facebook/twitter/etc/etc/etc all do it, so it's ok"
as if the fact everyone is spying on you somehow makes it ok ?!?!?
Very few people think it's ok, but the vast majority don't really see any alternative that is truly viable for them. If you have a smart phone, you have a Google or Apple account. If you have a PC, only a small percentage of the general population are even aware that you
can run Windows without a Microsoft account.
People have just been bombarded with so many privacy violations that they've grown numb to it. If they got upset and angry every time, they would end up being upset and angry all the time.
For better or worse, the human brain adapts to and normalizes almost any kind of long-term conditions, good or bad - you can't really avoid hedonic adaptation.
You win the lottery, you get really, really happy for a little while, then you get used to it, and it just becomes the new normal; if your previous financial situation was stressful and impacted your happiness negatively, you will probably be less stressed and unhappy, but you'll still end up somewhere around your neutral baseline before long.
Your privacy gets invaded and abused on a daily basis, you get seriously upset and angry. But if it keeps happening, and you see no effective way of stopping it, you won't be able to maintain that rage for any significant amount of time, and eventually, you just get used to it and accept it as normal.
Remember when Windows 10 came out, and how ridiculously angry everyone, myself included, was about the forced telemetry and forced OS updates that you not only couldn't refuse, but that would self-install and reboot your computer? I sure as hell do, and I stayed away from Windows 10 for as long as possible, and then used various tools to disable as much of that BS as I could - I didn't start actively using Windows 10 until this year, when I inherited a PC that had it installed.
And yet now, with it being set to go EOL next year, all anyone can talk about is how great Windows 10 is, and how they don't want to move to Windows 11 because it is so horrible. They've all forgotten about the incredible amount of BS Windows 10 forced on them, because, to them, it simply became the new normal.
People's values are terrifyingly malleable. Expose them to anything for long enough, and they just accept it as normal, and barely actively notice the change in day to day life, whether it's incredibly beneficial to them, or incredibly harmful. Everything gets normalized. It's a key part of how we maintain a functional existence without breaking down and going insane, but it has a lot of issues, especially when other humans decide to take advantage of it.
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