So you do remove the cookies regularly, but you also believe that removing the cookies is "shooting ourselves in the knee"?
Then overall, privacy is a much larger problem. For one, with generative AIs coming, it is very scary to realize that those big corps know almost everything about almost everybody (maybe not you, if you don't use cookies, don't have a smartphone, etc), and are technically able to train generative AIs with that data.
The second problem is that because the business model is surveillance capitalism, then big corps don't optimize for making a product that users are willing to pay for, but instead they optimize for gathering more and more data about their users so that they can make profit with it. Typically social networks play against their users in order to sell them.
Then overall, privacy is a much larger problem. For one, with generative AIs coming, it is very scary to realize that those big corps know almost everything about almost everybody (maybe not you, if you don't use cookies, don't have a smartphone, etc), and are technically able to train generative AIs with that data.
The second problem is that because the business model is surveillance capitalism, then big corps don't optimize for making a product that users are willing to pay for, but instead they optimize for gathering more and more data about their users so that they can make profit with it. Typically social networks play against their users in order to sell them.