This a debate that is happening in public health and beyond public health. In 2020, colleagues and I wrote a paper about contact tracing, talking about what we described as “corporate contact tracing” and raising questions for debates by public health authorities and scholars about an increasing reliance upon private sector organizations to execute their duties and responsibilities to the public at large. It raises a lot of difficult questions. In my mind, there's no clear way to draw the line.
The fragility of the public health system matched with the incredible data collection capacity of a number of private sector organizations makes it seem quite reasonable that we would turn to Facebook, etc., for data. Maybe that's a good idea, but there are also ways in which these public policy turns might drive more business toward these platforms.