While I don't agree with these sorts of industry practices and believe the US needs a universal data privacy law, I don't see how matching up some relatively im

While I don't agree with these sorts of industry practices and believe the US needs a universal data privacy law, I don't see how matching up some relatively impersonal metadata could be considered worse than directly listening in to private conversations. The advertiser trying to sell my friend appliances didn't really get a lot right about them. They're a renter and the advertiser thought they’d like to buy a major kitchen appliance just because we were in the same location. If they were able to listen in to our conversations they wouldn't have sent them an advertisement at all.