How to explain the people who complain about government snooping while giving a pass to "tech" company snooping. Perhaps they are white collar criminals or unethical people. They might be engaged in tax evasion, fraud or something else. Some may work for "tech" companies.

Without the "tech" company snooping ("data from internet advertising"), there is no issue with the government buying such data. To fix the problem, we need to stop the "tech" company snooping. The self-proclaimed "engineer" crowd employed by "tech" companies will obviously oppose any such thoughts.

As the internet grew, maybe the aspiring government snoopers went to work for "tech" companies. Who knows. Whatever the case may be, "tech" company snooping on the internet has far exceeded that of any government, whether online or offline.

In the US and other countries, citizens have laws to protect them from the government. There are no comparable laws to protect them from "tech" companies, e.g., collection, use and sale of internet advertising data. Laws limit what the government can do with the data it collects. There are no comparable limits on usage of data collected by "tech" companies. It is difficult to find any limits at all.

If these companies want to sell data to the government, nothing stops them. They could be selling data to criminals for all we know.