That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data.
It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on.
Yet these small businesses have no idea what data they are collecting. The owners are completely clueless. They have all this data collection shit on their website because someone else who has no clue put it there.
They see facebook and google collecting all this data, and think they need to collect data too. But they have no idea what to do with it. At best they look at a few numbers and get a feeling that all the money they spent on their website was worth it.
But it's all bullshit. 90% of businesses don't need invasive tracking, don't know what to do with the collected data, and could save money if they didn't bother to track all that useless data.
User tracking actually requires linking to associate online activities with user personas. Anonymization systems are designed to break linking.
Most companies don’t want to sell their user data because they consider it competitive, and most data brokers don’t want to anonymize because why would they if they’re already selling raw data? They aren’t interested in our software because we prevent singling out of identities.