Alternatively, you could use a browser instead of an advertisement delivery app.

It really doesn’t. I highly doubt there isn’t office politics going on inside Microsoft, Apple and Google, but unlike them, Linux development is all public. If anything, that’s likely to curtail a lot of bad behavior rather than encourage it.

Ah yes, the printing press: Likely the most cumulatively subversive memetic infection vector ever conceived.

Define ‘mind-control’. Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation has been perfectly capable of changing people’s broad moods since 1985 and is being actively used to treat depression right now. The underlying technology is only going to get more precise, especially as more research on spintronics is done for other purposes. Sure, right now our understanding of how what goes on in a given brain translates to ‘thoughts’ is insufficient to change those thoughts in any reliable way, but there’s little doubt that when we do, the technology to make it happen will almost certainly be around.