[_manifold]

This is pretty spot-on.

At the risk of sounding like a hipster, or gatekeeper, I think the biggest tipping point was around the time that smartphones became commonplace in the mid-late 00s. The internet and web was already gaining momentum, but smartphones put it in everyone's pocket. It also turns out that most (read: non-tech) people don't want to have to piece together their own set of tools, they want a set of matching Fisher-Price tools handed to them on a platter - hence the popularity of the iPhone and iOS ecosystem which Apple controls with an iron grip. They would rather have a magic black box that does what they want without having to think about how it works or what is going on behind the scenes. I'd say everybody is guilty to some extent, but generally I feel it's this mentality that is largely responsible for the frog-letting-the-water-boil situation we have gotten into with things like data privacy/user tracking/etc. There was a time when "don't post personal information" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a mantra, but now that the internet and web are mainstream, such advice has been ignored. Yet, people wonder why things have gotten the way they are and why bad actors are taking advantage of the situation.