1. If an insurance company finds out that you’re more predisposed to a disease, they will charge you or your employer a higher rate

2. The Fed gov’t has ~20,000 laws, it has more than it can count, can you tell me that you haven’t broken a single one? Could a creative prosecutor find something you’re guilty of if they had enough information on you?

3. In 2012 (edit: 2010) target sent ads to a teen girl for baby supplies, the father angrily talked to the store manager asking why they were sending baby supply ads to his daughter. When he found out his daughter was pregnant, he apologized to the store manager. Target had a good idea the girl was pregnant because of the items she bought in their store. How would you like it if corporations know details about your family before you do? (Pro tip: they already know things you don’t know)

4. Organizations are not monolithic, they’re full of people who are constantly moving around and organizational priorities change. Any restrictions on use and protections will be ignored eventually and changed in privacy policies, which they have complete discretion to change.

5. The world is filled with clever and unscrupulous people, they will never stop finding ways to use your data in ways we can’t imagine, not all of them will be in your favor.

It's all about understanding behavior. Humans, all humans, anywhere in the world are creatures of habit and routine ... Once you understand that you can start to exploit it. And it doesn't matter if you're doing it now, the data they're collecting is there forever, as ML algorithms are getting better your understanding of the data is getting better.

Let's take a concrete example : the cambridge analytica case ... Let's say for the sake of argument I've determined that blue collar workers between the age of 30 and 40 that are in major cities have a 40 to 60 percent chance of voting Republican now if take all of those that have been to a church once or have a close relative that have and bombard them with ads showing how the democrat candidate is supporting abortion for example (wether that's true or not) now the Republican vote have a much better odds. Of course I'm oversimplifying but this is not science fiction this was done with a very good efficiency in different countries and it's just one example ...

Social standards are changing all the time. Maybe there's something you're blind to that'll be considered really offensive by 2040 standards. I know my views on what's offensive have changed over the last twenty years. Even something like digging up and releasing an off-color joke can have serious consequences. It's easy to say "don't ever be a dick by today's standards," but it's much harder to say "don't ever be a dick by tomorrow's standards." Why risk it?

I will help you out.

Let me tell you a story. During communism, my grandmother openly disparaged our great and beloved leader Janos Kadar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_K%C3%A1d%C3%A1r) in our town. She was called in to Budapest, to a police station where it was known that tortures as punishments to political enemies happen. She was asked if she really said X/Y/Z about Kadar. She went on a loud rant about how Kadar is [insert disparaging comments here]. The policeman went pale and ordered the crazy women to be taken away and sent back to her town before anyone even hears such heresy - to their judgement, the woman was obviously crazy to show such defiance in that political climate.

If you think that kind of society won't ever happen during the next X thousand years while the elite have unlimited power to surveil, and if it does we will ever have any chance of breaking out of it - well, I would like to advise you to never go near casinos.

Edit: corrected genders, no genders in my language.

"It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?

... Google knows."

Off the top of my head the risk of identity theft and black mail are probably biggest reasons why privacy is important. This is especially concerning when you realize how "secure" data often leaks and becomes public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

The main assumptions you need to be wary of data harvesting are:

1. (Some) people will act against your best interest for their own gain (most often to get money, but, sometimes, to undermine people or ideas they do not like)

2. There are always things that you believe/stand for (pro-abortion, pro-BLM, anti-vaccine, anti-pesticide, pro-house garden, etc.) that someone somewhere disagrees with. These are increasingly identifiable and actionable on.

3. There are always traits (skin color, medical disposition, height, IQ, etc.) that are identifiable and therefore actionable on.

4. Modern data collection is much less visible and obvious than it's ever been. This means the people doing this collection and the people acting on this data are subject to less societal and legal pushback than before, and receive this pushback much later along the line (meaning they can build more momentum behind whatever they're doing before getting called out, if they ever are)

5. Data is never secure indefinitely. Eventually, there's a good chance it's sold to the highest bidder, regardless of who that bidder is or what their intentions are.

With the above assumptions, we can see people are more empowered to discriminate against and take advantage of others. They are also more easily able to remove civil liberties without getting called out.

I think some people believe that the people who would do this kind of thing are few and far between, but it only takes one person with weird ideas and some clout getting this kind of capability to make life miserable for a group of people. And people probably underestimate the number of people with low empathy in the population.

Here is an extreme but real world example of what can happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag

Just study history, information is power.

Data harvesting and processing technologies were what enabled the efficiency of the holocaust.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

cambridge analytica: surveillance enables psychological manipulation which really hurts democracy