Making the data inaccurate absolutely makes it worthless; it’s worth is in its accuracy.
Hypothetical: $company you're trying to use needs to "verify" you using $inaccurateData from $vendor.
You're absolutely screwed if the verification questions you're asked are relying on the "polluted" answers
Similar vein: if the "polluted" data indicates you might be gay or replublican or musilim or into some seriously unhealthy lifestyle choices like smoking and $someCompany decides that you're a smoker and therefore your too risky to insure.
no data >>> polluted data.
Imagine being in China where they tend to watch you and make profiles on you. Then suddenly the profile of who you are goes completely random. Is it possible this gets the attention of state-level actors where you had none before?
Exactly.
Any argument that boils down to "but the profile is basically useless" will always be inferior to "there is no profile"
While many states in the US have laws against it now, for awhile there companies were basing if they would hire you based on your social media profile. Having no profile at all may exclude you from getting a job. Or, when I went to get credit for my the first time in my later 30's. I had always been a cash buyer before then, and proof of my existence beyond my ID was sparse, the guy on the other end of the line was like "Did you even exist before yesterday?"
See Aliexpress accounts becoming unusable based on ... well, who knows what?
See Google accounts becoming unusable based on ... well, who knows what?
Not the same as identity verification but a significant problem for your account still. Often fatal. It is an issue.
Are you the one taking out credit cards and potentially tanking your credit score? No.
Does it still negatively impact your life? Yes, because the information landlords/banks receive from credit unions only shows the low credit score.
Do the banks/landlords care about the fact that it’s fraud? No.
It’s ultimately YOU who has to do all the leg work to report the fraud, make sure that your credit history is fixed, and that your credit is frozen as a deterrent to for future fraud issues.
So you see how data-brokers having this data on you is equal to not having any data on you if their data is garbage?
Asking for a list of smokers? You'll pop up. Ask for a list of pregnant women? There you are. Likely gun owners? You're on that list too.
None of the people requesting these lists are checking the rest of that person's profile to look for conflicts. They just feed all the profiles into the data machine and run everything en masse.
So does this prevent the data brokers from having an accurate profile on you? Sure. But it is absolutely not equal to them having no data on you.
Will it narrow down if someone is trying to track me? Probably.
Except for when your health insurance company sees that and starts charging you more because of it, or your life insurance rates go up because of it, or your homeowners insurance goes up because of it, or your employer forces you into a smoking cessation program because they made you sign some kind of "smoke free pledge" for their own insurance reasons and now they think you're lying, or when someone decides not to date you because the background check they ran on you made them think you lied in your online dating profile when you said you didn't smoke, or when society gets real weird in the future and smoking goes from being "unacceptable in public" to "child abuse" and now CPS is wanting to investigate you, or who the hell knows what other thing could come and bite you in the ass now that you've got "smoker" in your permanent record and everybody feels entitled to dig into your personal business whenever they think it might give them some advantage.
That's the world we live in. Anybody willing to pay gets to look into the most intimate parts of your life that are none of their business and that ends up affecting your life in ways you'll never see coming and you'll probably not even know why or when it's happening. The more data you put out there for people to find, they more they'll find ways to screw you over with it.
To be sure it used to be more costly in the times of paper advertising and US human employees. But some records are very expensive at brokers, so still matters.