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Advertisers absolutely do want people’s personal data. It helps them build better dossiers on individuals. This helps them target ads. Improving ad targeting improves publishers and advertisers profits because consumer responses to advertisements increase as advertisement relevance increases.

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Advertisers want broad demographic groups ("English-speaking zoomer from a middle income family"), or anonymized cohorts with known statistical distributions. ("Cohort DFHY12 has 13 clicks versus cohort KHFD35's 145 clicks.")

Personal data ("A John Connor from Stockton, CA has bought 359 FPV drone parts last month") is the purview of law enforcement and state-level actors.

Having worked with advertisers this is absolutely true.

But if they have the latter data they'll sell it in a heartbeat.

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