It's been a bad saying for a long time. People (and laws, at least in many places) just don't care enough about this stuff. It's just an extra revenue stream,

It's been a bad saying for a long time. People (and laws, at least in many places) just don't care enough about this stuff. It's just an extra revenue stream, it's there, and it doesn't really cost you much to tap it. Bury some opt-out in some onerous process and you're covered (if even that is required) and people mostly won't complain too much, and will actually change their behavior less. Taking it lets you compete more on things people do care about, or helps you pad the bottom line. For actual change here we need either regulations with teeth, or consumer behavior to change enough that there's a real cost to doing this stuff. Probably both. To a significant extent there aren't necessarily competitors for people to switch to in a lot of areas that are meaningfully better on privacy, and (relatedly) people often don't actually know or notice what these companies are doing, so it's tough to have "market forces" do much even if people did care.