Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.
First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.
I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.
So you got aggregated analytics instead of data about individual users.
Meanwhile other companies are selling your name, phone number, address history, people you are affiliated with, detailed location history, etc.
Which one would you say is "selling user data"?