Below is a disturbing amount of information data brokers have ammased from buying your data from trackers in ads and apps.
"a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.
... can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.
... target customers by categories that are "often based on specific sensitive and personal characteristics or attributes identified from its massive collection of data about individual consumers." These "audience segments" allegedly allow advertisers to conduct invasive targeting by grouping people not just by common data points like age or gender, but by "places they have visited," political associations, or even their current circumstances, like whether they're expectant parents. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava’s database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."
wow 10 months flew by since this was posted and since then the United States had a surprise privacy bill that is bipartisan that sort of addresses the issues you and I mentioned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/
This bill was proposed around the same time the TikTok ban was announced. I speculate that law makers had a difficult time framing the arguments against TikTok when "the data of citizens have no protections so there was no easy legal grounds to forbit the likes of TikTok to harvest it"
From what I've heard, this bill is pretty good. I need to educate myself more on it, however.