Right. Meta and Google are much less shady about this.
Consequently, they're not protecting data because they care about privacy -- they're protecting data because the wider they share the raw data, the less value it (their product) is.
It's economic self-interest, not ethics.
If they didn't have ad networks, they'd sell anything and everything in a heartbeat.
I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse.
All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.
I look at it a slightly different way.
Absent the vertical integration, they wouldn't dominate the market.
Absent dominating the market, they wouldn't wield as many resources.
Absent as many resources, they wouldn't have been able to build a panopticon in the first place.
And even if there were excesses in an alternate world... there would be a market of competitors, which would encourage different behavior.
And possibly even (gasp!) regulation because of the worst excesses.
Instead, FAANG wield vast resources, culled from entrenched monopoly positions, and act just responsible enough (plus lobbying) to avoid regulation.