[rjf72]

Have you considered a couple of issues here? The first is that while companies may simply be in the business of harvesting massive amounts of information for advertising today, once they have that data they can use it to whatever end they like. From the legally gray such as manipulating elections to their benefit to the outright illegal such as using that information to gain leverage over politician, media, regulators, influential figures/celebrities, and so on. Kompromot is a term from the KGB era. Yet now private corporations such as Google and Facebook have many magnitudes more information on everybody than the KGB could have ever even imagined possible.

The second is as a peer comment mentioned: information these companies collect is subject to end up in government hands anyhow. People are so quick to forget about the Snowden leaks of things such as PRISM: [Program participation entailed NSA access to] "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Examples included email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats, and more. [1] Some of the companies confirmed to be working with PRISM are: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

I think things like this fall of people's radar because it doesn't get mentioned in the media. But it doesn't get mentioned in the media for the same reason it was never mentioned prior to Snowden either. These programs have not gone anywhere and, if anything, have grown only more expansive. The NSA didn't set up an exobyte scale data storage center [2] on a whim. Everything you submit to a major corporation in the US is something you should equate to submitting to the US government as well.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center