Not saying you are one such person, or that you are doing so intentionally, but this argument is a clever sleight of hand employed by surveillance capitalists and their apologists to deflect attention away from the real issue: that thousands of well-paid, highly intelligent engineers devote 40+ hours a week to coming up with ways to influence your behavior.
“Selling personal data” — as if your particular affinity for left handed baseball gloves were of special interest to large corporations — is a red herring. Let’s stop perpetuating it.
But there are companies that sell personal data. Google is not one of them. The phone companies sell your location. There are regular articles about companies buying up chrome extensions to harvest/sell browsing data. Etc
“Selling personal data” — as if your particular affinity for left handed baseball gloves were of special interest to large corporations — is a red herring. Let’s stop perpetuating it.