So many people up in arms about Facebook. When the reality is that both cell phone providers and ISP's ACTUALLY sell your data. Both location data and DNS query logs. But sure, let's focus on the "social media boogie man".
There are actual data brokers in the advertising industry. Seedy companies who with a tracking pixel ( or just outright data dumps ) can give you actual PII data. Facebook ( and to and extend google, althought an insane amount of malware goes thru google ads,I’m sure you’ve gotten the “you’ve won redirects”), have been putting those companies out of business.
Both Facebook and google have a ton of flaws. Facebook has been super naive on some areas. But Most of the reporting on their “data issues”, have not remotely offered a real view of the industry, or what actually happened.
It was the other way around! You were able to use Acxiom/etc data to target people on Facebook
Selling the ability to target different demographics of people with different deceptive and divisive messages to foreign government agents is also bad.
We can recognize both of these things, and perhaps even find a common root cause.
The other is literally how all advertising has ever worked! ( yes, cable TV was targeting you ). Yes, placing an ad in a certain location is also targeting. It's not inherently bad, it can be abused though.
The implied "please oh save us facebook", is well, WTH. Should we stop all political advertisement? should we prevent outside money in local elections? should we prevent foreigners from advertising in a different country? These are all great questions. But no one has ever had the right answers.
We're crucifying a company because they amplified society. We are asking them to solve societies evils. We are not focusing on the actual evil itself. ( sorry for the rant, but you went on one too :-P )
And yes, non-transparent targeting of opposite fact claims to different voting blocks is quite different from "put a TV spot on Conan because the young people like him", not least because anybody could see the spot on Conan, and because TV advertising is regulated.
Wifi probe request tracking is by far the biggest invasion of privacy IMO (it works even when you're not connected) yet hardly anyone talks about it.
The fact of the matter is that there's a huge market for harvested data, and corporate parasites of all kinds have slithered out of the woodwork to compete for the largest, most intimately-detailed sets of information, and none of it is consentual (in the sense that, if people were actually privy to the scale of this nightmare, no one would agree to it).