The article implies a lot of risk for having so much personal data circulating around without our control. but the article, and many others like it fail to show how all that risk can adversely affect us.
I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did? maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me after I investigate the matter objectively.
Privacy is important because it protects you from the influence of others. The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never know that you were discriminated against. If they know what tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you about politics and manipulate you into voting for their preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on.
There are quite a few stories that have cropped up over the last decade or two that show this is actually happening.... the most precient one I can recall was where Target outted a pregnant teenager to her parents before she even knew she was pregnant:
The big issue to me was always the data falling into malicious hands.
Sure it's not a big deal if you buy a red shirt and I buy a blue shirt but it is a big deal if you can piece together the security questions (thankfully falling out of fashion as a recovery method) for my bank account.
It's not a big deal when you don't get an advertisement for your local university but if an authoritarian government roots out gay people because they have access to credit card data for Grindr subscription charges that's probably not great.
I guess my impression is that it's not what's happened so far (although certainly innumerable lives have been sullied for weeks, months or years at a time due to identity theft, credit card fraud, and the rest), it's the potential of what could be.
I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did? maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me after I investigate the matter objectively.