Data Privacy Risks

Just because the data isn't interesting to anyone right now doesn't mean that a future oppressive government won't use it against you

Maybe the government having access to all of your data....

Because that data can be seized by cops or mined by secret services.

Case in point - pre-ww2 governments collecting data about their citizens(religion, sexuality, race, political affiliation) which was then used to actually murder people by the Nazis. Just because the current government doesn't use the data in a malicious way doesn't mean the next one won't.

Scary to think all that data will be up for grabs.

That's a broad field. I might not even know if some data collected about me leads to a higher price when looking for a product or a flight on the internet. I don't know what the immigration officer or the police may find on record about me when checking my data. An insurer might have given me a less favorable tariff without my knowledge based on some data about my driving experience, my hobbies or my health data. And so on. It is not that you know every time you're screwed that yo

Makes you wonder, if these secret services can't keep their own data safe, what's gonna happen with the data they capture from us?

So you don't think it is a big deal because you believe your private data is not important.The issue is that perhaps your data is not as important right now, but it is possible that one day you might do something that might upset someone in the power and any information about you might be used against you (and that would be years and years of your past since that data wouldn't be gone).Just look at Snowden, how they tried to use every petty detail about him. He was careful though

The aggregation of data is extensive and the ubiquity of the net means the data covers nearly every aspect of your life. Such information can be misused in many ways. Unfortunately, those misuses don't really become clear until the data set is already built, so there is no way to undo it. Even if Facebook or Google don't exploit the data themselves, the data could be stolen by criminals or seized by the government.Are there personal things in your past you don't want your in

This is similar to the flawed "nothing to hide" argument. "Nothing to fear"?Data is eternal, and is analyzed and aggregated forever. Just because there's nothing realistically to fear _today_, doesn't mean that a future AI won't find reasons in that data to label you a terrorist/murderer/wrongthinker, and apply whatever policies are deemed acceptable at that time. We're really not far off from a Minority Report future.This may happen by acc