> Why would this be a Google and Meta problem?

They collected and profited off the data. If you're building and optimizing tools being used by criminals, you bear some culpability.

Same reason it’s an issue for an auction site to trade stolen goods

All are at fault here. Companies giving this data to Google/Meta/etc., and Google/Meta/etc. for being so eager to hoover up data by hook or by crook.

They didn’t willingly share the data.

The default behaviour of these pixels is (or was) to gobble up every bit of data on the page, including the values of all form fields. However, this was _not_ common knowledge at the time and certainly not communicated when implementing a pixel.

It was negligence that lead to this data being leaked, but the silent default behaviour of tracking all form values is insane. Most people would opt out if given the option up-front, so the fact this was silently enabled by default and hidden away until you actively looked for it at least partially shifts the blame to Meta. They obviously knew what they were doing.