We call it stalking when an individual does it.

It should be, flatly, illegal to collect that sort of data about people without a business need to do so, and illegal to use it for any other purpose, transfer it to any other entity without the same restrictions on its use, et c., when it's needed (like: credit card companies and banks obviously need to know where & when you spend money, but they shouldn't be able to use those data for anything else at all—no aggregating and re-selling to others, no mining spending trends for investment intelligence, no targeting ads at you based on it, none of that).

Companies who track your information, including FAANG get regularly investigated and often fined for violating antitrust laws when they use the data they've gathered to limit or outright kill competition. I find it disingenuous to ask for evidence of some kind of vague "companies controlling people" when it's obvious that they do it on a larger scale all the time.

No, companies do not mind control people on an individual level, but what they do has all the traditional effects of monopolies/oligopolies that are not democratically controlled by the people affected but a handful of rich executives.

I'm not even going to go to the "advertising controls people" dialog tree. If it's not obvious why having the power of putting anything you want in front of billions of people is powerful, then I don't think there's a discussion worth having.