In the 1920s being Jewish in Germany was perfectly legal. Not long after it was not.
That's the only example I need to convince me that the government does not need to know everything about who am I and what I do and what I think.
That's the only example I need to convince me that the government does not need to know everything about who am I and what I do and what I think.
* In the 1930s being Japanese in the USA was perfectly legal. After 1942 it was not.
* Prior to 1947, Americans had freedom of association. Starting in 1947, numerous people were denied employment, and some were jailed ("Hollywood Ten") because of their association. This was a campaign of both government and corporate intimidation.
* Over the past decade or so, numerous people have been denied a certain amount of freedom of movement without any sort of due process because their names generated a match on the TSC's No Fly List.
Those are three very easy examples taken just from the USA. You could generate a much longer list with a bit more effort and expanding to other countries.
So turning over everything to this large group, with all its power is... risky to say the least.
The more information the government has, the more it enables future oppressive action.
Registering a person's lawful property or activities (whatever they may be) is a great way to target them in the future. If the government decided to outlaw, say, baking soda, it would be prohibitively difficult to enforce because there is no existing mechanism for tracking the sale, ownership and transfer of baking soda. Persons owning baking soda could easily bury it in their backyard and claim they never had it. Not so if the gov't has an inventory of all of your property (or access to your credit card statements, for example).
So my point is in line with the OP: simply because an activity is lawful doesn't me we should accept unlimited government surveillance of it.
When I use this example to illustrate how an information that was once "clean" can become "dirty", they don't seem to understand. They act like that "incident" is soo far away, some sort of horror story(!) that has nothing to do with today. Everything will stay like it is now.
I guess the idea of something like 1933 happening again is so frightening or detached that they just dismiss it.
EDIT: I should add that people who actually lived in the time of Nazi-Germany might have a very different reaction to jgrahamc's argument. I made my observation above mainly with young people.
I would also extend my distrust to corporations. While I don't have a ready-to-mind example, I am sure that, humans being human, gross abuses of power by corporations based on certain datapoints being available exist. I am pretty sure the LGBT community has a slew of great examples there, as well as other outsider communities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_Republic_of...
Having nothing to hide now doesn't mean you'll never have something to hide in retrospect.