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Comment by crimsontech | Hacker News Reader

Imagine the data showing you only went to bed at 2am being used to argue a car accident was your fault, when it wasn’t.

There are plenty of ways your data can be used against you and used to make incorrect assumptions about you.

Ah, so the danger of this technology comes from imagining unrelated bad things happening to people. What if your phone activity revealed that you were awake at 2 am and then courts incorrectly blamed you for an accident? Well, the bad part is courts incorrectly blaming you for an accident, same as with the sleep data.

I personally think it is more important to remember that this info is not necessarily limited to "only courts". Typically, this info is available to anyone with the right amount of cash. Not that I think my sleep data is interesting or valuable...someone seems to think it is...and that should be concerning.

Yes, which is why I also don't want my phone data to be hoovered up by data brokers and appearing in evidence exhibits.

There is a lot of literature in this area of philosophy. This is the famous "You have nothing to hide if you do nothing wrong" which has been proven 1000 times to be a fallacy.

I think the danger in both scenarios is the fact that this data is available for abuse in the first place. It doesn't have to be. You're opening yourself up to the potential that unrelated bad things might happen in return for personalized ads.

Note, this isn't illegal or (in my opinion) even unethical, it just makes me and many others uncomfortable. If that's a tradeoff happy with, then more power to ya!

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