How did this conversation devolve into an emotional political debate?

I posted, "I don't think people are surprised that Facebook has the data, but many still aren't really aware what can be done with it. It's this dawning realization that causes most of the concern."

This had nothing to do with politics, at least not directly, rather (implicitly) on the fact that data like that recovered from Facebook could be used in combination with AI to reliably infer ways in which people can be influenced. The technology can be applied to advertising and politics, certainly, but just as much so to medicine, psychology and many other areas of research. (Like most science, it can be used for good or evil.) Scientific references to this are widespread, can easily be found using Google, and most have nothing to do with the possibility that the last US presidential election was manipulated in this way.

Many people are just becoming aware of the powerful uses to which the technology can be applied, and some are starting to fear it.

I don't think people are surprised that Facebook has the data, but many still aren't really aware what can be done with it. It's this dawning realization that causes most of the concern.

On their website, Cloudflare makes a big deal out of the privacy their DNS service provides--even citing the probability that ISPs collect and store data from those who use their (ISPs) DNS. Yet, as others have pointed out in this thread, the ISP can still log all of the IP addresses their customers connect to. What could really be gained, in terms of privacy, by using 1.1.1.1 or any other DNS service?

NR

"The thing we have to remember is we cook food with this wavelength all that differs is the wattage and time it takes to do the cooking. Yikes!"

Give me a break! We cook with microwaves focused in a small chamber at ~1,000 Watts. Wifi transmitters typically produce 5 milli-Watts, and microwave power drops off with the square of the distance from the antenna.

We also cook with fire at around 3,500 degrees F. Do we just cook more slowly if we're standing 50 feet away from the flame? Does an oven door provide sufficient protection?

The Trump campaign didn't use the data that was handed over by Facebook because it was useless in and of itself. According to the story it was "every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level". What does that mean? Read on in the Guardian article and you find, “The data that was shared was literally numbers – numbers of how many friendships were made between pairs of countries – ie x number of friendships made between the US and UK,” Facebook spokeswoman Christine Chen said by email.

Continue reading the Guardian story and you see there was more to it than what was handed over by Facebook:
"Between June and August of that year, [2014] GSR paid approximately 270,000 individuals to use a Facebook questionnaire app that harvested data from their own Facebook profiles, as well as from their friends, resulting in a dataset of more than 50 million users. The data was subsequently given to Cambridge Analytica, in what Facebook has said was a violation of Kogan’s agreement to use the data solely for academic purposes."

It was this data that could have allowed the Trump campaign to sway public opinion using a variety of methods. The (reported) fact that it wasn't used past late September or early October of 2016 doesn't mean it hadn't already been used. The Trump campaign paid $5.9 million to it. Do you really think they just changed their minds and threw it away?