In China, a system of Social Credit has been created and large firms, such as Alibaba — a foreign version of Amazon — form a “partnership” with the Chinese Communist Government in order to track purchases of Chinese “citizen-subjects.” There may be more intervention beyond tracking, such as when government controls things bought.
Back in January 1999, Amazon stock wasn’t going anywhere, and stock shares sold for between $3 and $4 a share:
A full decade later, which is normally a death knell for firms, no increase in valuation had occurred:
Stock shares in March 2009 were even selling at a little less than in 1999. As said before, this decade-long inability to make profit would normally “kill off” a company, unless that company was being propped-up by external interests with deep pockets.
At the end of 2009, an executive order was signed which created federal goverment schemes called Special Access Programs which could operate largely in secret, potentially spending billions of US taxpayer dollars on schemes kept in the dark (immune to the general audit process by the public).
As is usual, national security interests were cited as the reason to hide the spending.
After that, Amazon stock price — for the first time in more than a decade — began undergoing an exponential growth rate:
Is it just a “coincidence” that — when the Executive Branch “legalized” dark money schemes — that, after going nowhere, Amazon stock took off?
Reference
[Amazon flat-lines until, by sheer coincidence, federal dark money schemes get authorized] — https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/stock-price-history
[new-fangled ‘Special Access Programs’ allow agency heads to operate in secret] — https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2010-title3-vol1/pdf/CFR-2010-title3-vol1-eo13526.pdf
[U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government from using dark money “hidden spending” schemes] — Article I, Section 9. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”
With FB being government involved, it's no surprise that online shopping, collecting data on shopping habits, has some government involvement. I watched a docu where a journalist asked Google for all the data they had on her. It got printed out and was 40,000 pages! Data is the new gold, personal data, that is.