>The outleash regarding collecting personal data for election fiddling started with Trump and Brexit

Definitely false, Apple even built business model around it and actively promoting it's privacy as a selling point over Android.

But surely Trump amplified it because, unlike Obama, he is very divisive.

Anyway, if you happen to have a time machine I will happily jump in with you and go back in time and warn against the dangers of data hoarding and privacy violations but I doubt that it will be effective because it's Obama and his campaign wasn't divisive so we will end up with the argument that if you didn't do anything wrong there's nothing to hide.

We wouldn't be able to demonstrate that with privacy violations you can divide a continent(Brexit) or make Trump a president.

Besides, I'm really not happy to approach the problem from the "What about Obama" angle. Is "what about" even a useful argument? What's to be achieved if you are right that Obama indeed did the exact same thing? Should we just go ahead and fill out the missing information on our Facebook profiles because Obama did it too?

To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.

I reacted back in 2012 to the fact that Obama's campaign bragged openly about doing same thing. Back then the problem statement was a bit newer to me, I guess I was a bit more sensitive to back then.

The few articles back then praised them about this.

Disclosure: I don't really mind that Trump became president or that UK decided to leave EU - wouldn't have cared if the outcome was the opposite either. It's just different approaches of running countries with different pros and cons.

Look, using data to target audience is nothing new. That's the promise of... everyone in marketing? Does Nielsen ring any bells?

"Obama and Trump both used user data" is equal to "Reddit and Hacker News are the same, both use upvotes".

The way that data is used is what all matters. The risk is to hoard and distribute data, the disaster is to use that data to manipulate the population to do something horrible(I'm not necessarily saying that Trump is horrible but there are many people who see it that way).

And...

>To clarify, the general public outlash started after Trump and Brexit.

You'll need to prove that one because we had multiple products and a giant corporation(Apple) targeting privacy cautious audience before all this happened.