Comment by utopiah

Ah! That's actually exactly why I don't use WhatsApp, Google, etc anymore.

When Meta bought Oculus a decade ago I though "why the heck are they buying this VR company..." which prompted me to read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" 2018 Shoshana Zuboff's book.

The idea is precisely that they don't need more of the same data, they have enough (even though they do need to keep them up to date) but they instead need more KINDS of data to keep on earning money from selling ads.

They don't care for the technology itself, only for ways to distinguish needs better and that's exactly what a new digital medium provides.

TL;DR: yes.