I would point out that many organizations collect data, but tech companies are the most effective at abusing it. Their competence makes them by far, the most dangerous.
It's the breadth and depth of data which Google, Facebook, and Amazon have access to (and their ability to leverage it) that changes the privacy threat model entirely.
A mom and pop store I give my credit card to in town can't track me across the Internet and correlate my browsing activity to my purchases, for whatever nefarious purpose, for instance. They can't read my email and correlate it with my location data. And so on. That's the difference.
Worse, Google in particular is financially incentivized to track me and perform all that correlation for the purposes of advertising. A family owned business I visit downtown, not so much.
A mom and pop store I give my credit card to in town can't track me across the Internet and correlate my browsing activity to my purchases, for whatever nefarious purpose, for instance. They can't read my email and correlate it with my location data. And so on. That's the difference.
Worse, Google in particular is financially incentivized to track me and perform all that correlation for the purposes of advertising. A family owned business I visit downtown, not so much.