Instead of surveillance, what if we told advertisers what they wanted to know?

Companies may one day decide to forget everything they think they know about us, and just use the data we give them. After last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook announced a major change to its ad targeting system. As of October, the company has permanently eliminated its “Partner Categories” feature, which had enabled advertisers targeting hyper-specific user demographics to do so by purchasing access, through Facebook, to consumer data gathered by third-party brokers like Acxi...