Oh it’s not just tech companies, it’s tech companies getting ahead of the government who is going to demand the same thing. Say something that the government doesn’t agree with, boom, you already have the information readily available.
We could fight against it and refuse to use these services, but that would change the things we are all addicted to.
It’s rolling out, so it just hasn’t hit you yet.
It’s to stop automated scrapping. Old reddit has less/little/no protections from that. New reddit has a lot more in place. So when you log in (which now you can only make an account with new reddit), it tracks a lot more information so it’s more difficult to get around bans. Basically stops the majority of automated scraping, which reddit doesn’t want.
If you are getting banned from new accounts on reddit, you probably were saying or doing some pretty swarmy things.
Much like the internet in general. Anything that becomes popular in general goes the same path, even without private equity. That just accelerates it.
Except the government wanting this information didn’t exist. That’s the future, you ID will be tracked (it already is) and the government will know exactly what you say, where you go, and what you do. Throw it at an ‘AI’ for ‘normalcy’ and you have Minority Report in a much sadder way.