Facebook and Google do not pay for this data. Flo sends it to them for free, because it improves the performance/ROI of Flo's marketing. Facebook and Google ha

Facebook and Google do not pay for this data. Flo sends it to them for free, because it improves the performance/ROI of Flo's marketing. Facebook and Google have no semantic understanding of this data, so it does not have inherent value to them in terms of creating configurable targeting segments. These are arbitrary data points sent by the app, and they might as well be labeled "A", "B", "C", and "D" rather than their sensitive names. Flo can optimize their ads towards occurrences of event "A" or they can run ads towards "people who have triggered event B in the last week but not event C", but this doesn't offer specific value to other advertisers or FB/G themselves. That said, when all of this is put into an ML black box, you never know how data points may be correlated. Maybe the system learns that people who trigger event "D" also end up buying baby clothes. That could lead to observable ad patterns, even if no one can explicitly tie event "D" to pregnancy.