People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting.
In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.
Google and Facebook both have a consumer-facing presence so you think of them as being more accountable, but they're both advertising businesses, no doubt.
That there's usually a middleman is something of a random detail. You don't look through millions of profiles and pick this ad for this person. You group people by common characteristics and then match ads to those. That a different advertising firm is going to suddenly do something so much scarier sounds more like science fiction than fact.
I agree with you but my first reading of the OP lead me to believe that she/he meant that Google and Facebook are advertising firms.
It's different than Google's insight into your buying interests from Gmail, because they're the same organization.
People should know this intellectually at least, but they haven't been faced with the implications.
Analogy: I give a box of old family photos to a cousin. The cousin later needs medical treatment, and sells the photos to a pawn shop. Then the shop goes through the photos looking for the really outrageous ones to sell to third parties. I get really mad. Who do I blame?
Maybe not, merely for owning it. But what if the owning or acquiring entity decides to sell that data to medical insurance companies, or private investigators. Are there then HIPPA complications? Because now the data is interesting because it has bearing on medical or insurance decisions.
Services like Google, Myspace and facebook are free. Don't kid yourself, they are doing this for money. If you pay - demand privacy. If it's free - come on, you did put all the personal data voluntarily, didn't you?
All they use is statistical data. Be fair - no one really cares about your individual private data, unless you're rich and/or famous. But then you will be much more cautious about sharing personal data on the web. You will, won't you?
But maybe someday they get sold and actually nobody knows what happens then. There is probably no variable for moral and ethics in the function of selling your company and the data you acquired over your users. It's like opening a completely new dimension to think about the problem of privacy, at least to me. Thanks for sharing!
Admittedly, not as annoying as all the rest, but still, their business is advertising.