The only sane choice is to simply not use the technology that tracks us.

Have you ever tried not to use a smartphone?

I don't mean to be rude; I just don't think that "simply not use" is going to work.

I think a much simpler explanation is: Mr. Trump has heard of these companies before. Full stop, thats the extent of his analysis.

I thought of it the other way:

Essential service workers are the service animals and the politicians are the disabled.

Intelligent disobedience may be required to prevent the politicians from walking us all off the edge of a cliff. They're clearly far too busy yelling into their respective echo chambers to see the cliff coming.

Agreed, except the point of them being unable to see the cliff. For me it's almost as if they consciously decided to test their freshly-baked algorithms of gainful cliff falling...

I've had the following in my ~/.bash_profile for quite some time. I leave it here in the hopes it help someone.

  ## History configuration, see HISTORY in bash(1)
  ## builtin fc, aka fix command, for history manipulation
  ## fc [-e ename] [-lnr] [first] [last]
  ##  -e or invoke editor ename; defaults to $FCEDIT
  ##  -l or list commands
  ##  -n or suppress entry numbers
  ##  -r or reverse command order
  ##  first, last selects a range of entries by numeric index
  ##
  ## fc -s [pat=rep] [cmd]
  ##  -s or substitute all occurences of pat with rep
  #
  #  - h() is short for history
  #  - r() is short for replay
  #  - always append to the history, don't overwrite
  #  - save multi-line commands in a single entry
  #  - insist on vim everywhere
  #  - don't record commands with a leading space or duplicates
  #  - constrain the size of the history file
  #  - ignore common things
  #  - constrain the number of history entries
  #  - set up nicer timestamps
  alias h="history"
  alias r="fc -s"
  shopt -s histappend
  shopt -s cmdhist
  export FCEDIT=$EDITOR
  export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
  export HISTFILE=$HOME/.bash_history
  export HISTFILESIZE=1048576
  export HISTIGNORE='ls:ls -l:ls -latr:ps -ef:fc:h:history:clear:exit'
  export HISTSIZE=8192
  export HISTTIMEFORMAT='[%F %T]  '

Thanks, @tiny_epoch -- that was helpful. :)

Presuming one follows through on this, how can I trust that I am in fact opted-out?

The need to conflate humans with resources so the C-level can exploit them without too much thought.