there are much worse things, like spamming.

Spamming isn’t bad, spamming can be fixed with a spamfilter.

Selling your age, gender, location, preferences, etc to anyone who books an ad? That’s bad.

They're not selling your personal information to anyone.

You can read more about how online ads work here: https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html

Except to a foreign government that is actively hostile towards my rights.

That’s more than enough.

Because this foreign government is booking ads?

I don't follow your line of reasoning here.

No, they do that in addition to giving information to advertisers.

If any company gives any information about me to a third party, that's already wrong.

And while advertisers don't get the data directly, they get it indirectly. They get the user specification (age, gender, rough location) they bid on, and the IP, and several advertisers even used that to track you between different websites their AdWords ads were shown on.

They don't give your information, directly or indirectly, to advertisers. Using aggregated information for ad targeting isn't "selling" information to third parties, no matter how hard you try to loosely redefine the semantics of the word.

I'd ask how you think they are giving data to foreign governments, but I have a feeling you'll try to redefine "mandatory court subpoenas for individuals" as the same.