The most common outcome of this terrifying mass surveillance is people are shown ads more relevant to them. Most people are rationally fine with this.
The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.
The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.
Plus the information and therefore power asymmetry between people and corporations increases. Imagine a business-to-business 'analytics' service to identify or predict insider threats such as whistleblowers or labor organizers. Background checks already get help from the private sector - this is just the logical next step. I'm sure they'll think of many more uses, if they haven't already.
Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".
The objective of the comment was to address the author's deceptive use of the term "pointless".