(now, if the government were willing to buy user information at market prices, Google and Facebook at least seem totally cool with that based on their ever-expanding directed marketing businesses :P).
Huh?
Huh?
One discussion: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/10/what...
It's easy to understand why the typical company would choose to participate if they simply need to provide a data stream to gain a new revenue stream.
It's also easy to understand why a factory will dump pollutants into a river instead of disposing them "properly". It's our job as a society to create incentives and remove options that provide this sort of "tragedy of the digital privacy commons" (not a perfect analogy).
By paying for access (at presumably a rate much greater than cost), the government makes firms who refuse to provide access less competitive in the market than firms who do.
Cite your sources if you have any proof of your claim.
I didn't explicitly say they give that data to 3rd-parties, but I'll clarify that they do not give the unanonymized data to third parties (analytics from campaigns provide a fair amount of anonymized data). To the best of my knowledge, there is no method of getting discrete, individual specific data directly from these companies unless you have a subpoena.