I consider such articles to be "test balloons" for ideas. If they encounter too much resistance, there is plausible deniability. If no, the idea creeps forward to a more formal setting.
I for one am thankful they're putting these pieces out. What they're describing is a straightforward result as the traditional surveillance industry (eg Equifax) merges with the nouveau surveillance industry (eg Google). We've had two decades of people ceding their computing autonomy to centralizing webapps, with critiques being dismissed as conspiratorial thinking. Despite growing up on scifi, most people in the tech industry seemingly need things to be written down to make the conclusion inescapable - this is always how "Web 2.0" was going to end up.
