You're on HN and "What's the difference" is really your question?
1. Friendly private human interaction shared by two people.
2. Data is collected, sent, analyzed, sold, shared, distributed, stolen, and abused in order to maximize profit across expansive markets at the expense of any respect for the user's privacy. The user is tracked, distracted, and tricked into obeying algorithmic market forces of massive and opaque breadth. Every piece of data ever accrued is collected and stored in order to create an invasive profile of a user's movements, decisions, actions, and relationships, so that predictive programming can be implemented in attempts to guess the state of the user's mind prior to the user coming to these conclusions, or at least to convince the user that this is what the user wants. The end goal is technology that effectively usurps the user's free will, so that the user is completely reliant upon it for basic decision-making. The goal is to destroy free will. A society in which every individual action is known by governments and corporations is not a healthy society. It is an electronic prison.
This just seems like such absurd hyperbole I can't tell if you are serious or not. "technology that effectively usurps the user's free will" "electronic prison"
I don't believe any of this. Nobody can usurp my free will no matter how much data they have on me. Heck, even if I told them every last piece of private information I knew about me, I doubt they could increase my spending even 1% more than I currently am with all the coupons and targeted advertising and subliminal marketing in the world.
I'm glad that you feel you are immune to these advances. That doesn't change the corporate agenda though. They want you to buy their stuff. You, me, everyone. They pay loads of money to teams of people dedicated to utilizing the latest technologies to bend your will to their desire, with whatever tricks their minds may conjure. They work in concert with others doing the same. It's "just business".
We have a global population that is addicted to their phones. A great deal of their worldview is shaped on a daily basis by a small illuminated screen that fits in the palm of the hand, full of deception and manipulation, which goes well beyond grocery shopping. The phone is an ideal espionage tool since, for most people, it is turned on and broadcasting constantly, and always at its user's side. I mentioned "electronic prison", scaling out from this, in the sense that law-abiding citizens are under constant surveillance, similar to inmates in a prison. We have the ability to move around of course, but we can hardly do so without being watched, which does not equate to actual freedom. The human experience is being overrun by addictive technology that manipulates our will through mechanisms that are totally unknown by the average user. It may seem like hyperbole because its full effects have not yet been understood. It's not like this is the end: this is just where we are today. The intrusion into our lives will only escalate.
