It's unprofitable. The cost to user-trust (and hence future data collection and revenues off that data) is more than they stand to gain from blackmailing any one person - even a U.S. Senator or President, or Chinese Premier. So they don't. The only thing that would potentially justify this from a corporate strategy perspective would be an existential threat. Politicians in question know this, and so they don't bother trying to get rid of Google or Facebook, only reign them in enough to please their constituents.
When I was working at Google (which was close to a decade ago now, before tech overreach became a household buzzword) I'd say "People regularly underestimate how much data Google has on them and overestimate how interesting they are." Everybody's first fear is that Google's going to look up their search history and blackmail them with their porn fetishes. They never stop to think that their porn fetishes, no matter how hardcore, are boring, and shared by millions of other people. As a Google engineer you get desensitized very quickly to the fact that 10% of search queries are porn-seeking (17% on mobile), and looking at other people's kinky pasttimes is about the very last thing you would want to be doing.
Similarly, it's significantly more profitable to advertise to people than it is to kill them. Every dead person is one less potential customer in the global economy.
When I was working at Google (which was close to a decade ago now, before tech overreach became a household buzzword) I'd say "People regularly underestimate how much data Google has on them and overestimate how interesting they are." Everybody's first fear is that Google's going to look up their search history and blackmail them with their porn fetishes. They never stop to think that their porn fetishes, no matter how hardcore, are boring, and shared by millions of other people. As a Google engineer you get desensitized very quickly to the fact that 10% of search queries are porn-seeking (17% on mobile), and looking at other people's kinky pasttimes is about the very last thing you would want to be doing.
Similarly, it's significantly more profitable to advertise to people than it is to kill them. Every dead person is one less potential customer in the global economy.