I agree, and I think your point can be even more generalized -- businesses can collect information about their customers, there's nothing wrong with it. The ke

I agree, and I think your point can be even more generalized -- businesses can collect information about their customers, there's nothing wrong with it. The key difference is that, while a website may know from your ad click that you were targeted by a campaign looking for college-aged men or whatever, it doesn't necessarily know who you are. That's the difference between personally identifiable information and simply targeted information. There needs to be safeguards to avoid abuse. For example, if the targeting dimensions of an ad campaign are so narrow that the few people fall into it, it shouldn't be targeted (a good example would be geographic targeting of devices that are inside of your house -- too granular). But, I don't care if a website knows that I am likely male or my coarse age or whatever, because i don't have to tell the website who I am in the real world if I don't want to. "Selling your data" is commonly understood by the public to mean something like this -- people suspect that facebook just gives lists of their users to third parties and asks them who they want to send ads to, which is the accusation that Facebook is denying. If I end up making a purchase w/ a website, then sure, they'll know some things about me from the FB ad click referral and the underlying ad campaign they ran. I feel fine with that, I'm entering a relationship with the business where they know quite a bit about me anyway -- like my name, my address, what I'm buying, etc. I don't buy things from places if I can't trust them.