If the only reason people collect all of that information about me is that it's cheap to do so, would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? That sounds like a win as well.
So you're asserting that marketing companies know people better than they know themselves? If that's true, that's incredibly damning of marketing companies and is a great argument for why they should have access to less individualized data about people.
I would imagine, if I had info on _every aspect of a human's life_, such as their email, their documents and photos, their messages, their browsing history, etc, that I could tell what _they_ meant by "best" _at that moment_. If not, what _are_ we trading all of that information for? Ads?
Right, people radically overestimate how much a profile is worth. Someone who owns a house in a rich area is somewhat easy to identify, and you target them... along with everyone else who is also trying to reach that rich slice, so you pay more.
The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel."
However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.
That would probably be true if sifting through these data were a very complicated and thus costly thing to do. But is isn't, especially since you can more or less to it for all of your targets simultaneously. And there is good reason to do it, too: profiles of people are a valuable resource.
It's imortant to keep in mind that metadata alone says a lot about a person. Combine that with more precise data from a few people in the same set and you can end up with very accurate data about everybody.
Your personal data is of no value (unless you are of high-profile 0.01% of people).
However, the data of your city, state, country, gender, race is very valuable because then, for example, companies/government/foreign actors can know exactly what is this town, state, country, gender, race is thinking about any given topic. This is enormous value and this is why companies like Cambridge Analytica are so profitable.
Even if you couldn't narrow it down to an exact person, it seems like you could get good accuracy on socioeconomic status, cultural background, political slant, etc. Once you had that data it might be valuable from a marketing standpoint. It might not be useful for sites where there is a very specific user group, but for sites with incidental user generated content--even if it isn't anonymous per se, you could get a more accurate picture of your audience.
It's amazing how they make it difficult to give them more information. Granted, you aren't paying them directly, but you are effectively making their business more valuable by linking more accurate data to their profile of you.
Yep, and that's why it's important for the search engine to be able to collect information about you! It's not just for commercial ends like ad targeting.
And google has arguably the best information in the world since identifying specific people is their core business.
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