Joseph Cox’s reporting on the geolocation/tracking shit the US Gov buys up really highlights the direct link between consumer tracking (to sell them shit) and government intrusion into privacy.
Please let me know how to buy bulk consumer data from Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/etc-ad platform.
Ad-Tech isn't the ones selling data; they want to be high up in the value chain. Your ISP/phone company _is_ literally selling your geo-location and data (internet) usage.
In general, those companies aren't interested in bundling up data on users and selling it to third parties because the data itself is the nest egg. They go out of their way to, if anything, provide services for anonymous matching of interested parties to users they've collected data on, but not in a way that lets those parties pull the data back out.
I agree - faang/etc do not need to sell the data outside their walled garden but there are tons of vendors with sdks in millions of apps and pixels on millions of websites that have considerable location/user data. It’s easy to find how to buy + activate that data which is the point I wanted to make.