Please see exhibit A, the US telecoms infrastructure which has backdoors added by the alphabet agencies and has now been so thoroughly violated by Chinese hackers that they’ve basically given up trying to fix it. It would literally be easier to burn every telecom installation in the US to the ground and build new ones on the ashes than it would be to remove all the Chinese rootkits and back doors. All because someone just had to have a backdoor for the NSA/CIA/FBI.

Because they need a constant stream of data to feed the models. If people had to opt in then they’d be less likely to do so and the models would starve and become less accurate and therefore less valuable to sell. Remember the trained model is the valuable piece of the entire thing, that’s what companies pay money to gain access to. There’s no point in sitting on all that user data if they can’t turn it into a marketable product by feeding it into a model.