Where did all this "cloud", ...
Sharing computers that are installed in a centralized/efficient/shareable location is ancient. I just looked up when Service Bureau Corp and Tymshare started, and it was in 1957 and 1964. They took large IBM mainframes, and allowed small users to access them and run small jobs, using modems and dedicated data lines, both for RJE (remote job entry) and interactively via terminals. This makes perfect sense, since a small business can't afford a multi-million $ computer, nor the staffing required to operate and program such a beast. When I was a young programmer (in the late 70s and early 80s), we used to drive boxes of punched cards, and tape reels from data entry systems to a centralized data center location (about an hour on the German Autobahn), and come back a few hours later with invoices, orders, and printouts. The same is true today: With my account at EC2 and S3 I can use tens of thousands of computers, when I need them, without having to pay for owning them 24x365, and with the bulk of the management overhead shared efficiently with millions of other customers.
There may still be a place for having your own computer (today that's called "on-prem"), but that place is shrinking, as it becomes economically disadvantageous.
Decision support, data mining and business intelligence are also very old. Even in the mid-80s (when I was a student taking operating systems and database classes), the field of large databases (used for data mining) was already old. Just looked it up: The first VLDB conference (Very Large Data Bases) was in 1975.
People have been using computers to collect data about natural or industrial processes, since roughly when computers existed. Today we call it IoT, and think it's really cool when there are weather stations on many houses, cars can check in with their manufacturer to get firmware updates, every step in a production process is monitored and controlled efficiently, and a little mapping device in your car shows you where the traffic jams are in real time. But all this was done (less, more slowly, and more expensively) already 50 or 70 years ago. As a reminder: The whole concept of "Digital Equipment" and its PDP line of "computers" started as inexpensive and easy-to-program machines for controlling/instrumenting laboratories and machines.
...just one giant psyop or marketing trap for mass data collection.
If you want to have privacy online, you are doing it wrong. Stop using the internet. Get rid of your cellphone.
