But... why?
If I read your email and then selected "metadata" I found important, walked into a very busy public square, and started shouting your secrets you'd be right to be uncomfortable. If I, for example, made a reasonably accurate prediction that you are pregnant/on drugs/have ED/etc and then told 10,000 people about this you'd be right to be angry.
Yet...you're okay with a company doing any of this? Is it because you can't see it or feel it directly? The head in the sand approach doesn't work. With enough datapoints in one bin anyone can use "metadata" to make extremely accurate predictions about your private life. You need to defend yourself from the constant gathering of this metadata. Snowden warned us and apparently very few of us decided to listen. All it takes is one leak, one hack, one disgruntled employee, or one bad government to take all those secrets you're not thinking about and turn them into weapons to use against you. In a modern battlefield you are a target and the war has been going on for decades now.
Until then, it's paranoia.
For my part, my "public" life has not once caused me negative consequences, and I've lived it this way for 34 years. Why would I live in fear of something that hasn't happened to me, anyone I know personally, is not recommended by any industry experts, is not presented as a risk factor by group responsible for my well being, etc.?
You need to prove that all of that extra effort is worth the degraded quality of life.
Also can be stated as "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
No, nobody has to prove any such thing. This isn't an important issue to you -- that's fair. It is to others -- that's fair too.
You say "worth the degraded quality of life", but in my view, the degraded quality of life is always being under surveillance. Taking these measures improves my quality of life.
What I sacrifice is just a little bit of convenience. That's not a big hit.
And what you sacrifice is a lot of convenience, and a wholesale rejection by the very society you rely heavily on to survive. It's not tenable to live in this society and wear a ski mask while shopping in a grocery store.
I don't have to. It's sufficient for me to say that I strongly dislike it.
> Why share this belief if you can't defend it?
Why do you think this is something that needs defending?
Regardless, I think I have adequately defended it. It's an intrusion into my life that I don't consent to and I find highly objectionable. The reason I find it objectionable is exactly the same as the reason I object to someone following me around writing down everything I do, or peering into my windows at home.
> And what you sacrifice is a lot of convenience, and a wholesale rejection by the very society you rely heavily on to survive.
Neither of those things are true at all. I do not feel greatly inconvenienced, and I fully participate in society.
> It's not tenable to live in this society and wear a ski mask while shopping in a grocery store.
I agree. I don't do that. That said, if I'm aware that a store is engaging in facial recognition, I will choose to shop at a store that doesn't.
That, too, is engaging in the society I live in.
Edit: I think part of the problem we're having in our communication is that we're both coming from angles that are alien to each other, and haven't really worked out what each other is saying.
For instance, the questions you are asking me are difficult for me to answer directly because they make no sense to me in the context of this issue. I've been trying to interpret them in such a way that I can provide useful answers, but clearly I've failed. I suspect that's because we each have very different underlying assumptions.