Even assuming everybody in that village knows everybody else to the degree that Facebook knows you, it is at least mutual; ol' Grandma Francine knows I'm foolin' around but I know what Grandma Francine got up to when she was my age and who her daughter's real dad is, too. What private things do you know about the people serving ads to you? Nothing. Yesterday I saw someone on HN discussing their download of info from Facebook, which is supposed to include what advertisers know what, and they found they couldn't even find the advertiser's company name in Google.

And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.