I don't know - on the other side of the coin imagine if no data was collected. It would be near impossible for companies to do any sort of troubleshooting or QA.

Taking it a step further, it'd also be significantly more difficult for them to understand their audience and users... which could actually make the experience worse for those users.

Even in the more nefarious case of ad-tech, I'd personally prefer more relevant ads than generic non-relevant ones.

I'm not saying all data collection is fine and well intentioned, but I also don't think it is necessarily as zero-sum as people think.

I do think when data gets licensed or shared w/ 3rd parties it should be more clear how it gets used.