Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence.

The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them.

So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)

This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards.

I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them.

Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.