Well with Facebook you sign up and agree to a big EULA that presumably allows it. If I visit site A then site B, site B shouldn't be privy to whatever I said at a different location without agreeing to share it.

That's customizable isn't it? When I text I'd much rather have emoticons than a newline, whereas it's opposite with emails, and I've found that Swiftkey does a good job switching between them (somehow).

To my knowledge, there isn't a setting that changes it, but if you know of one, please let me know! I tend to send pretty longform texts to my girlfriend, so it's a bigger deal to me than probably most people.

Of course, recently we've been using Whatsapp instead and that works perfectly fine.

His point there was that not all ads are evil. As someone who has purchased things based off of Facebook ads that I've seen, I share his "lack of hatred" for ads, provided they're not annoying or malicious. If they keep services I like free or cheaper as a result of their existence, then I'm not going to complain about them too much.

Your last sentence is intriguing. Do you believe that ads are the only means to keep services "free" or "cheaper"?

If you do, then that would explain why you have come to accept them as "necessary" for services to be "free" or "cheap". (i.e., you've made a causal link between ads and "free/cheap")

If you don't, then I have more questions for you to answer.