[KozmoNau7]

It is not essential that they sort my feed, though. Everything still works perfectly fine with a simple chronological feed.

None of the tracking they do is essential to the service they ostensibly provide to their users, namely as a microblogging/discussion/sharing platform.

[rock_hard]

I don’t think most users would find value in a product like Facebook or Google without ranking actually.

I bet that nobody would! Ranking is what makes these products work...and it requires data to do the ranking.

[KozmoNau7]

Why do you think ranking is important? A simple chronological news feed should be perfectly fine.

Sure, rank search results based on how many users a given group has, and put the most popular ones at the top. That doesn't require violating anyone's privacy.

[rock_hard]

Trust me, if ranking had no value...no product team would bother implementing it.

The reason ranking is used left and right these days is because it makes products dramatically better.

[KozmoNau7]

And they are certainly allowed to do ranking. But they can only do it on non-PII data, on data that has been deliberately made public, and on data which people have consented to its collection and storage with unequivocal opt-in.