People buy crap they don't need all the time. The whole point of advertising is to sell. I believe the OPs are saying that they leverage information about you t

People buy crap they don't need all the time. The whole point of advertising is to sell. I believe the OPs are saying that they leverage information about you to bully you in to thinking that something is actually helpful and you should buy it, hence the talk about exploiting self esteem on a much more personal level. While I can't be sure if Google or Facebook actively do this kind of thing or sellers just use these platforms to do this, there's very little question that social media and consumer internet has gone rogue. Unless you've been living under a rock, you just have come across at least a few of those. I, personally, have no issues with these platforms collecting my data and making money off it in exchange for their services that I use. But when they do the same even when Im not using their services or explicility expressing my disagreement, I'm not cool with that.