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Privacy activists have long ignored any benefits of data collection and as we continue to extract more and more value from data this should become more evident and we will be forced to start discussing concrete harms rather than people's general discomfort.

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Of course, this is not true. Plenty of harms have been shown, particularly based on past history. But these are dismissed as things that couldn't possibly happen again. Which means that the objections will only be accepted when it's too late.

Marge: Do I have to be dead before you’ll help me?

Wiggum: Well, not dead – dying. [Marge gets up to leave] No, no, no, no. Don’t walk away. How about this: just show me the knife in your back. Not too deep, but it should be able to stand by itself.

Aside from running large scale analyses over large health data sets, what are some examples where the value derived from large aggregations of personal data is dispersed widely through a society rather than being captured mostly by a single corporation or organization?

Building large data sets doesn't necessarily mean from personal data. Look at open-data initiatives such as http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data . Lots of potential for useful tools to be created if the data is there, which won't happen if even benign data like that are kept under wraps/not collected.

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