Ad firm plans to use people’s data in a maneuver to sink data privacy bill

Just because you like to be attached to a pole doesn't mean we should let companies attach us all to a pole.

If someone "likes" commercials, well I guess we could have a web-place for them where they can go and we can avoid.

Ads themselves are just annoying but tolerable. But we're talking about targeted marketing. Ad companies keep data on you, the user, so they can squeeze out a bit more money from avertisers. That requires the users' consent in many parts of the world and ad companies still try to weasel around that. When you don't want them to have your data, a word from you should be enough. No hidden options, no clicking through a dozen pages, no ifs and whens.

Respectfully but strongly disagree. If people's survival requires constantly competing in scenarios that favor sociopathic actions and outright sociopaths while also repeatedly discarding kindness and devaluing communal activity in general the outcome is the same.

While you are right that the people at their cores might not be sociopathic and may be very uncomfortable and unhappy with the way they've become required to live their lives, the resulting society becomes as if it were entirely inhabited by sociopaths.

You can definitely condition people into acting entirely in their own self interest in the public sphere. And, unfettered capitalism is undeniably very effective at doing this. In fact, it's arguable that governments worldwide have been trying to regulate against this with almost no effect. I think the global climate emergency is an excellent example, though far from the only one. It's more the sum total of all humanities failures at this very thing.

Not a technical sociopath, no, but it does a damn good job of of getting people to mimic those tendencies. It just means those with the barest amount of empathy aren't successful capitalists, they just end up exploited and happy about it.