I feel like this still slightly misses the problem. I couldn’t give less of a shit whether they do or don’t make money from my data, I care that they are tracking so many things for that purpose that I can be identified and many lifestyle habits are visible, which is a problem when the data ends up with someone who wants to use it to spy on me. Which probably has never targeted me specifically, but my data is almost certainly in a tool capable of this. Because this happens frequently.
Of course this happens because they want to make money from it and sell it, but even if they only want it to idk customize my feed to make me like their website more and it never leaves their server, I’d still have to worry about data breaches. Or just someone else taking over and deciding that selling it is great, actually.
And even though I have decided that I personally don’t really care enough to deal with the downsides for quality of life, that doesn’t mean I don’t want this to stop via legal means.
Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.
I got into a long discussion with friends at work who were saying it’s silly to worry about protecting my SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER and getting upset at companies for leaking it because “if it’s gonna get out it’s gonna.” Like…WHAT. How goddamn okay are you people with fighting to prove you’re you and not the person who stole your identity? The fuck. For real.
Calling defeat before even trying is not only not grounded by facts - it’s playing right into their hands (their = data exchange companies and nodes in that network)
