The longstanding root of the problem is that we're relying on software that is under the control of an adversarial party, especially for creating a UI. This necessarily means that incentives are misaligned, and we are left as an unaccompanied homo sapien to be outwitted by the machine in front of us that we may have paid for, but that does not work for us.

It will be interesting to see where the GDPR goes, especially with regards to surveillance companies we don't directly interact with. But as long as we continue to do things like utilize a specific retailer's software for researching and planning purchases, the incentives are for that retailer to design that software to push us into funneling as much business (and extraneous personal data!) as possible to themselves.