Here's a novel perspective for you: This class of devices are subsidized pieces of technology for use by a group of people, a portion of which for whom it could argued would not have access to the resources this technology provides, and they have access to a greater wealth of data because they are not entitled to rights management for the data they produce, for better or worse.
The challenge of these systems is gaining value and insight of understanding different aspects of human behavior while considering the risk/reward calculation each actor engaged in the system. Your use of the words monitoring and surveillance betrays an implied connotation which could be described in the vein of paranoid or Orwellian. It's disingenuous to distill the entirety of what these systems do as "monitoring and surveillance [...] and a few data-driven suggestions here and there". It's more like "monitoring and surveillance" are what these systems are, implied context or not, and what you and I get out of it are suggestions informed by the data of what you and I and everyone else participating actually does within a system.
Your ideas regarding personal agency conflict in the post:
> Until we have a little more personal responsibility, I don't think illegal drugs should be legalized.
> It's your personal choice to play roulette with drugs.
The simple truth is that it is always a personal choice, whether it's legal or not. I accept that addiction would be a problem, but addiction is a mental/medical health problem, not a criminal issue. And it's totally fair to blame the government. Drug policy has allowed institutionalized racism to persist, even if not explicitly condoned from the higher echelons of command. Besides that, allowing these drugs to be legally used would allow companies to be made accountable for the health risks, the proceeds could be taxed by the government, and more than anything else, medical research could be performed on a number of these compounds as they hit the street.
In my mind, with how much young people these days talk about using molly/ecstasy, let alone research chemicals, testing kits should be more prevalent than condoms, but precaution is the kind of behavior that is stigmatized by overly judgmental people sitting in ivory towers like yourself.
A tongue-in-cheek observation is hardly ad-hominem. The remark was made to point out that you have a habit of cherry-picking arguments and refuse to see any reason behind opposing views in the same vein of the author, to state plainly. I don't actually care about who you are. At all.
And responding to a reasoned argument is hard to dignify when you have neither a response nor dignity.
You're awfully willful about this whole thread. To a degree that you might be the author.
It's a matter of convenience, not necessity, to bank and insure through the same company, but this exposes you to a greater degree of risk, which only compounds with irresponsible behavior as a customer. End of story. He shouldn't have used his personal account. That's part of the reason individuals do things like set up LLCs, to shield individuals from liability in operations related to business, but maybe this guy can't be bothered to understand stupid business or legal logic behind such decisions.
This whole thing reeks of an appeal to pity and logical fallacy. His background is not especially relevant to report on the situation. His switch from Apple to Android fandom and why he made that switch are even less important. If anything, his purported history as a developer should have given him every single indication that what he was doing was subjectively wrong, according to Google. He ignored these signs and subscribed to his own styling of reality. Seems like a sensitive homebrew developer with an overinflated ego ($500k worth of time, my ass) got iced for his bad behavior. Natural selection in action.