This is how a friend of mine got into ice climbing. They went to work as a glacier guide and got a avalanche training for free. They work to find their ice climbing hobby.

Okay I'll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you're hardcore FOSS.

Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it's still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can't necessarily say the same for other companies.

These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don't know where we'd be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.

On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it's not intrusive). It's hard to do our work without that data.