Let's say a streaming music service collects information on what you have listened to and how long. Is that surveillance? What if they use it to back a page where you can see what you've been listening to recently? If they start recommending new artists based on your listening history?
this is by definition surveillance -- a "...monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, managing, or directing." [0]
to possibly downplay it or imply otherwise because the collected information may (or may not) benefit the user is just spin.
Nothing inherently wrong with those features. The problem is some corporation owns this data, not us. It would be fine if it was some local software instead.
