>The companies make money by monitoring their customers’ online activity and selling the data, largely to advertisers.
I can't buy reams of data from Google. There are data brokers out there, but big adtech companies won't sell me the source of their ad success. Most of the data market is composed of smaller companies which don't run ad networks and wouldn't even come close to the eye of an antitrust program.
Reciprocity with credit cards is a thing too. It's how Amazon was able to re-target me with a product carousel for something I impulse bought at a Macy's.
I'm not really complaining but even tech savvy people can underestimate just how much of their information is out there.
The only difference is that one of these two things involves giving a whole bunch of private, sensitive data about everyone to anyone who'll pay and the other does not. If that distinction doesn't matter to you then I'd say that this isn't actually about privacy at all.
Considering quite a few people here browse with Javascript disabled, and how angry they get when an adblocker becomes worse. It's pretty obvious that the people who are likely to be most knowledgeable on the topic (as tech people on a SV news aggregator website), that Google/Facebook/whatever aren't enabling "friendly neighbors".
Running enough ads with your own tracking on SV platforms, will get you the data you want about your targets.
I can't buy reams of data from Google. There are data brokers out there, but big adtech companies won't sell me the source of their ad success. Most of the data market is composed of smaller companies which don't run ad networks and wouldn't even come close to the eye of an antitrust program.