ok folks, just to be clear:

No one. No one, sells your personal identifiable data on the internet. I mean, yeah, probably the dark web and super shady companies are selling your social security number somewhere. But not major corporation is selling your name or address to advertisers. That's illegal in the EU and multiple other places. They just don't do it and haven't done it for a long, long time.

What they sell is a profile of you. They don't sell "Javiera Mena, whatever whatever street, buenos aires". They sell "Woman, 35 y.o., single, 1 kid, Argentinian, languages spoken: English, Portuguese, Spanish, interests: [ music, hiking, horror movies ], countries visited in the last 12 months: [ Chile, Argentina, Spain ], most used websites: []... ". You get the drill.

Then, advertisers can go and say "we have this ad campaign, and we want to show it to Women between 30 and 40 years old, interested in hiking that have been to the Andes in the last 6 months. And bam! you get the ad. They didn't sold your name, but they very much sold and profited from your data.

This is how Meta operates. This is how google operates. This is how tiktok operates. This is how internet advertising operates, at large.

It looks like this is how Firefox operates now, too.
@javi I walked through this a while ago when commenting about privacy preserving ad attribution: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2024/10/13/protecting-your-privacy-while-eroding-your-democracy-PPAs-considered-harmful.html
Protecting Your Privacy While Eroding Your Democracy: Apple’s and Mozilla’s PPAs (Privacy Preserving Ad Attribution) Considered Harmful

The last few weeks have been interesting if you follow Firefox news. Mark Surman (President, Mozilla Foundation) and Laura Chambers (CEO, Mozilla Corporation) wrote posts saying that “Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising”. Predictably, there are a rash of articles and commentary about this – Mozilla being a punching bag online for its supposed adherents seems inevitable nowadays.

Youssuff Quips