That's the customer point of view. Spend sometime with a sales or marketing team esp when they are rolling out a new campaign or product. Targeting makes a big difference even though the conversion rates maybe low.

I think personal info, what you view, search for etc can be useful to both sides when both sides are seeking each other out.

But when it's one-sided is where things get ugly. When Alex Jones is trying to build a captive herd, the kind of data being misused is not so much your personal info/things you have searched for or viewed, but what I call "counter" type data surrounding the content you produce i.e. likes, retweets, views, upvotes etc.

This type of data is what drives the creation of an Alex Jones or a Kim Kardashian. Cause no sane person is out there searching for these clowns. The clowns come into existence only because these count numbers have an influence on people. 14 year old girls from Ecuador to New Zealand look at these counts for guidance on what is hip and that produces a Kim Kardashian with 110 million followers on Instagram.

These counter numbers need to be removed/hidden/shown less frequently or with delay and automatically the world will be a diff place.

When attacking FB and Google(YouTube), Twitter etc these numbers and their visibility to the uninformed and vulnerable of society is what needs to be attacked.

But what happens is people attack the personal info, search and view histories data collection which is actually useful. And that causes unneeded confusion and defensiveness.