Make money by charging for content. I miss the old days when people had to pay for stuff with tangible money, not with their anonymity. I would gladly pay to access content I found useful, just no tracking. Be content with the money and move on. No need to profile me, sell my profile to make more money. I pay to use several sites. I also block ads on these site, because the third parties don't respect privacy.

That said, I don't think the rest of your post is well supported. Surely they are using the info to try and target ads, but what prevents them from using it in other ways (including selling it to other people who want to use it in other ways) if they think it can make them more money? Probably, most of these companies aren't going to knowingly sell it to anyone who will use it illegally because they could be culpable... but there are probably things I don't want done to me that don't involve actual illegality. An example off the top of my head might be feeding embarrassing info to a tabloid. And even that stays out of the realm of "what if things really went bad?"

What you cite as "my preference" is really "what the advertising backend has deduced I'm most likely to buy" - that's certainly better for the advertising company, very likely better for whoever's receiving revenue from showing the ads (averaged over all users because yes, targeted ads do work better), but it's not actually _better_ for me. From my point of view as someone who didn't actually want to spend any money, it's worse, because I'm now more likely to spend the money.