I'm surprised that in 2019 people (especially on HN) still believe/claim that users trying to hang on to their personal data "abuse" this to "take useful data away from innocent webmasters".

There are dozens of real life situations where covertly collecting such data would be considered completely unacceptable and yet my comment arguing this was still substantially downvoted.

But I guess my point is being in a technically literate community makes no difference when it comes to making a buck. Once one agrees to take a "not an outrageous amount" of private data for a bit of money, they'll agree to take an outrageous amount for outrageous money. And I think this is a perfectly accurate explanation for what FB, Google, [you name it] are doing.