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Journalism also fails in uncovering it.

Public awareness is step one.

I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
>It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now

This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.

> where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided

Normal people, yes, but this is exactly what tech regulators ought to be gunning for. Even post GDPR, we just don't seem to have enough bulldogs in enforcement...

Journalism is almost dead. And if where it’s not it’s more of a summary of what happened rather than deep investigations. But only a small percentage of the population care about deep investigations anyway.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
The major other reason is that it is free, and most people are money-constrained.

Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.

Tons of media outlets have covered privacy failures in the past. The public doesn't care, and so the journalists stop caring as well.
Awareness and care is one thing. A unanimous action plan is another. Violation of privacy is not viewed through similar lens as say theft or other forms of crimes.
media profits from privacy failures by proxy due to adtech networks.

There's gigantic conflict of interest there.

journalistic media resolve this by having independent editorials. There's of course still structural issues, especially if those media outlets are traded or seen as investment targets, but the general structure has worked for 50-60 years.

This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.