In the hands of the government, yes. But companies can only use it to try, and fail, to get me to buy stuff I don't need because they really don't have the power to do anything unpleasant to me.
I suppose you, just like everyone else claims, are immune to marketing?
The most insidious form of control is convincing people they are forming their own opinions without any outside influence.
Regardless who you are, the content you are exposed to online and by extension in-person through your peers is shaped by who exposes it in the first place.
I'm speaking beyond just marketing, rather to general attitudes and knowledge.
Some governments will contract with companies to obtain data, or even subpoena the data directly. There are checks and balances. Generally the system and the people behind it are trustworthy and reliabily act from principles over partisanship or economic concerns. Furthermore, we can generally trust that will always be the case; in addition to established political norms and precedents. So I agree there is nothing to worry about.
Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, etc. can hand over all sorts of interesting data to the USG about you, assuming the NSA hasn't already taken it. And we know the FBI gets access to that, so...
