It absolutely is. I detest Facebook's level of tracking and invasion of people's privacy but I'll be damned if it doesn't enable businesses of any size to market with the same power previously reserved for supermassive brands for pennies.
I feel like there's basically no allowable nuance in this discussion because holding any opinion than "tracking is 100% bad with literally no upsides for anyone other than ad networks any business that claims to get any value whatsoever is being misled" is taken as a defense of the current state of internet advertising and is the digital equivalent of burying your head in the sand while everyone else continues like you don't exist.
If you can't understand and explain why the fence was put there then you'll get nowhere trying to argue that it should be torn down.
> but I'll be damned if it doesn't enable businesses of any size to market with the same power previously reserved for supermassive brands for pennies
You forgot to add this part:
> At the expense of the consumer, and usually without their consent or knowledge.
Facebook is the particular bad guy here, because we usually need to rally around one target to get anything done (and they are by far the worst offender). But the goal is not to take down Facebook, it's to limit or eliminate tracking and other practices that violate and exploit the privacy of people.
Of course small businesses can benefit from doing what Facebook does, just like a homeless person can benefit by robbing a bank. That doesn't mean it's right.
Stronger privacy laws might kill small businesses that engage in that type of behavior, but it's not going to kill the economy. New business will be born, and the free market will fix itself.
I think its pretty clear that no matter the take on tracking, facebook is a bad actor with previous scandals including knowingly took money from children, experimenting on people's feed, did large scale psychological experiments on their own users without consent, selling/giving access to user data to political firms, collecting email contact data without consent, etc etc. And those are only just what I remember off the top of my head.
Even if you were ok with tracking facebook is not the people I'd trust to do it ethically.
