It's not necessarily insidious but it's not fear-mongering either. Substantial reason many apps exist is to scrape data and sell it. It is a constant invasion of any data they can get their hands on, and only recently have there been efforts (by Apple mostly) to fight back against it by giving you notices when apps are tracking location, adding "ask app not to track" popups (for tracking data across other apps !!), etc

At one point a friend of mine looked up his google data, it could literally tell when you lay down, when you lay down and are on your phone, location history, etc. Right now it's all commercial and I do admit I don't much care, but our phones are basically little spy implants.

Kind of a tangential rant. I also use GR just for keeping tracks of books, TBR and such.

True that. And all good points. And I think most people probably aren’t too worried about the spy aspect. Personally, I’d rather support my local library, and have access to things that may not be on Amazon, such is out of print, or super independent.

I would be curious if GR actually suggest such items.

I have hundreds of books read and on my to read list and still the most basis recommendations on rince and repeat, so I'd argue otherwise.