You shouldn't get (be) downvoted for having an unpopular opinion. Unfortunately, I think this is a dangerous path we're on as a society. But I do think you're

You shouldn't get (be) downvoted for having an unpopular opinion. Unfortunately, I think this is a dangerous path we're on as a society. But I do think you're wrong. 1. It's unlikely that FB doesn't sell your data if the buyer is willing to pay enough, have close enough connections. There's an asymmetry in your relationship with FB. You have no way of verifying that they behave in a way they say they do, while FB has huge incentives to behave in a way they say they don't. 2. Binning people is information about who they are. There are 2^33 people in the world. With 33 50-50 bins you can de-anonymize anybody. If you have an idea or a target in mind (say Italians, and then you bin by language), you can do much better than 23 bins. For example, I could target my wife with personalized ads with, maybe, 5 bins - very unlikely nationality, unlikely job for a woman, unique set of languages. In fact, without knowing the nationality, job, or language, you can now probably target my wife fairly easily. You example for Vancouver illustrated this. There's maybe a few thousand 18-25 year old security specialists that live in Vancouver. I'd guess less than 10k, certainly less than 100 000. A small group of people can manually comb through 100 000 profiles in a few days. 3. Given the spectacular security failures in this business, a mere claim of secure isn't good enough. Surely FB hires top talent, but they also have a history of epic failures or disregard for security to deliver early. If I can't trust Sony, a large tech (if not IT) company, to upgrade basic security after getting PWND the same way thrice, why should I trust FB? After all, Sony had great programmers before Zuckerberg was born. 4. Personalized ads necessitate a model of each individual. Most lay people never stop and think that that is the case, but most people are loath to have any profile of them being built and stored by anyone. Nevermind a company that has a (I believe a well earned) reputation for being sleazy. 5. You prefer personalized ads. Most people don't, especially when you point out that personalized ads necessarily means that a profile of them is being built by FB. Most people prefer unobtrusive, lightweight irrelevant ads. Apple is not blocking personalized ads, they're changing their default settings to what it believes most of its consumers prefer. I have never met an Android user say they prefer Android for the better ad or privacy experience. It's always price premium, feature premium, UI, and tightly locked down phone. In fact, I've converted many would be Android users by pointing out Google's more interesting practices (personally I'd get a librephone, but my original SE is still going strong).