The general idea from that is: computer systems that know a lot about you can provide personalized services for you or about you. Those services can be to your benefit or detriment, depending on who controls the data, their intentions and their priorities (e.g. quick cash grab vs sustainable customer relations). If you want better examples: Google maps knowing your location allows you to navigate in places where you don't know the surrounding area or where you are exactly; Gmail reading all your mails allows you to filter crud out of your inbox and pretty much solved the spam problem that plagued the 90s; Facebook makes a lot of your life transparent to corporations, but it also does allow you to keep up with the lives of friends in distant places that you don't meet often. Now, I am all for solutions that make your private data more opaque to the services that consume it, and the way they consume it more transparent to you. But services based on your personal information will not disappear, and the reason is not some dark evil conspiracy to monitor your every step (or, at least, not just some dark evil conspiracy to monitor your every step) but the fact that people find this services useful. Like the industrial revolution, the issue is not that we are going forward with this new uses of energy/information, but that we are doing so largely without consideration of their harmful externalities (pollution in the case of the industrial revolution, misuse of private data in the case of the information one).