Sure, but if you had phrased the question more fairly and said "Should it be ok for a company to give you free services in exchange for tracking everywhere you go?" I think almost everyone would have said yes.
> If someone went back in time to tell people that this new internet thing was going to lead to the US having more surveillance than East Germany or the Soviet Union, there would have been laws passed and systems designed from the start to prevent it from happening. The fact that it didn't happen this way, and our culture's privacy norms have been destroyed as a consequence, is more reason to act to prevent further damage, not a reason to just give up.
My intuition here is the same as yours. That this is a bad thing. That privacy matters in an intrinsic sense, not an operational sense. But i'm not so sure that's really true anymore. The privacy ship has sailed off into the sunset for a while now, and at least to me, the harms don't seem that substantial. All that data is mostly used to give me ads that are more targeted to what I might want to see anyway. There certainly could be lurking latent risks about, but it's a little hard to see exactly what they are.
Then you should add shadow profiling, data banks linking together data of dozens of different companies, politically targeted advertisement that pretends to be from human users.
Yes the free market is nice and all, still the internet is a hell of a creepy place. It is undeniable that the reason this was allowed (comparing to direct mail advertisement for example) is that it was always believed to be impossible.
If someone went back in time to tell people that this new internet thing was going to lead to the US having more surveillance than East Germany or the Soviet Union, there would have been laws passed and systems designed from the start to prevent it from happening. The fact that it didn't happen this way, and our culture's privacy norms have been destroyed as a consequence, is more reason to act to prevent further damage, not a reason to just give up.