[cstejerean]

None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.

Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.

[wcfields]

> None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers.

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.

[cstejerean]

> we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels

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"?