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It is much better, considering there are companies that do actually sell our data.

"rent us out to the highest bidder" is the perfect description of Google and FB's business model. It's hard to imagine how either company could change course at this point, even if they wanted to.

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Exactly, people lovw to give a negative spin to 'rent','bid'. I see it as an exchange of value. Data, money both serve same purpose: we give them vakue,they give back. My data helps them improve their systems, make recommendation engine etc. and they give me services in return. Making sense of vast troves of data is their main competency or of any internet service. Would YouTube be relevant without recommendations? Just open incognito mode in YouTube and find out! One thing they could do in future is maybe allow users to store their data somewhere locally,and which gets updated with new recommendations,profilinf info; but that'll involve losts of code changes, engineering challenges i suppose.

I think part of the issue is inequity. I don't have the requisite skills to even begin to do the calculations, but I expect that Google is getting way more (monetary) value out of me than I am getting out of their recommendations. Especially when their recommendations have often been for videos that they know I've already recently watched.

Even if there is nothing wrong with the business model, the "prices" can still be unfair. A lot of the values of these things are inherently difficult, if not impossible, to calculate (at least seemingly).

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