This is a distinction without a difference to me and many others. I'm sure the adtech industry like to believe it because it lets them cope that they're the good guys, unlike those sneaky data brokers.
As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of our child slaves."
The problem is the intrusive violation of privacy involved in building giant databases of personal information on every person on earth, not that someone-other-than-Google is doing it.
> As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
Then have that argument, please. If your argument is that "privacy impacts of advertising are bad and here's why Google's business model doesn't improve that" then that is one thing. Telling people that Google is selling your data is a lie.
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