Nothing is ever free, especially on the internet.
Internet companies collect data about you — what sites you visit, what you buy, what demographic you fit into — in exchange for “free” use of their products, like Google’s Gmail and Maps or Facebook and Instagram. They use that data in part to make your experience on those platforms better, but also to target you with ads, which pays the bills and then some.
The problem is that consumers don’t usually know the extent of the data collected about them, nor do they know how exactly that data is used, where …