A lot of data is obtained by unaware people. First of all, there are unethical "data brokers" who collect data from illegal sources like data breaches. These data brokers can sell this data to companies who are not seen as law-breaking, potentially even big companies like Google and Facebook.

Moreover, most companies including Google and Facebook collect data legally, but in a way which still makes most people still unaware. They hide the full scope of their data collection in terms and conditions, and it contains data you would not expect like camera and eye tracking, location data for non-location-based apps, and contacts and other apps you would not expect sites to have access to.

There are also ways sites can collect data which are very sneaky, such as embedding "tacking pixels", small images which exploit HTTP to monitor who accesses a site and how long. Even when your computer sends data seems anonymous, like IP and browser metadata, companies can use this anonymous data to build a "profile" that the same user visits multiple sites (because those sites get requests with the exact same IP and browser metadata), until they eventually associate it with a site visit to the user's real profile.

The scope of data collection is extreme, because nearly any and all information which is publicly available will be collected by big companies. For example, OpenAI has allegedly scraped a decent portion of the *entire Internet* for training GPT. Niche artists everywhere have had their images trained on diffusion models.

This absolutely poses an ethical problem, because people don't really consent to their data being collected. Even though there are "consent" forms, they are rarely used, because they are either hidden "opt-out" forums, or not consenting severely restricts your access to software (or in some cases, they are just ignored). Many people argue that it's one of the major issues in society, and facilitates exploitation and authoritarian control: if someone has data on you, including private data, they have leverage over you, and can catch you doing subversive activities.

Nonetheless, there are some upsides to Big Data. Like LLMs, they would not be possible without massive web-scraping. Also, the money generated from data collection allows much of the internet to stay free, and companies like Microsoft and Google to give away free storage and compute. But they key is, while *some* data collection may be ok, it's very likely that the amount of data collection going on right now is too much and needs to be limited; either by regulation, or proper security education and tracker-free alternatives.
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