My points are:
- while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not. Lawyers, Doctors, Jiurnalists, Activists and so on certainly are targets that are and will be spied on if it is easily possible for adverseries to get the data (e.g. without a real.court ruling etc). I profit from a society where these groups and their communications are protected. The chance that this can be used against these groups in form of kompromat for example is enough for privacy rules to exist.
- Privacy rules also try to counteract a inbalance of power. In the age of complexity those with more and better information have more and better power. “We are the good ones” or “But we would never do such a thing” are cute arguments, but ultimatively I want to live in a state where the accumulation of power by unelected forces is limited by design. When a company knoes all about you while they themselves tell you only the marketing version, there is a extreme inbalance in power that benefits them against you. In practice it would look a bit like the cambridge analytica thing where every individual saw only (fake) things that nudged them into one or the other direction by using facebooks targeted adverticement, but on a bigger scale it was targeted manipulation by false imformation. This is not only unethical, but potentially dangerous to the instable societies we live in.
- privacy is about marketing. The big californian giants are so good to make things simple for all of us. But when it comes to the question how much data they collect when, they cannot give a straight simple answer, but a wall of legalese that doesn’t tell anybody what’s going on. If you actively decept people by downplaying the potential impact of the privacy violations you profit from, that is unethical for sure.
That beeing said you can have the standpoint that making money is more important than a functioning society with trust between citizen and the companies they are customers of — but don’t be surprised when the accumulation of power and the erosion of democratic principles show devastating results. Tech companies do shape our future if they wan’t or not. The question is, if they do it by critically following up onto their good intentions, or by blindly giving in to their incentives?
Right now it looks like the latter.