[robteix]

To be honest, I don't either. But the data is still there. You don't know if in ten years Google is going to start losing money and is forced (by its shareholders) to find alternative means of monetization.

You can't really say Google is perfectly secure and will never ever ever be hacked and leak your data either. Maybe it will never happen, maybe it will.

Therefore I believe I should have the right to say "hey, I don't want this private corporation to have my credit info".

[QAPereo]

Or potentially worse, if they're compromised/hacked in some way and that data simply enters the wild ecosystem.

[CivilianZero]

I still can't see why I should care if some stranger has my purchase history.

I suppose some people might feel weird letting strangers or anyone know what they buy, but that's an argument for the ability to opt-out, not for filing a complaint with an agency or starting a lawsuit.

[vertex-four]

There's plenty of people who get up to things that would result in severe professional damage if it became public knowledge - I know a handful of teachers who are into BDSM in their private lives who are eternally terrified of their employers or a journalist catching wind. "Some stranger" isn't necessarily the issue, it's someone who has the ability to harm you that's the issue.

[jancsika]

I find that to be an awkward form of argument because any category that is sufficiently taboo is going to split the audience into two camps-- a small group who empathize with the practitioners and a larger group who don't. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a taboo.)

The problem at hand is that Google and others are scooping up everyone's data. A change in the way these companies decide to use that data can have an effect on everyone's lives, but without anything like a Congressional Budget Office or public debate to gauge whether the benefits of those changes outweigh the costs for the people who are affected.

[digi_owl]

Or look at the short term Mozilla CEO that was ousted over a public outcry regarding similar private matters.

Edit: Hrmf, never mind. Egg on my face.

[dragonwriter]

Publicly-disclosed (by legal mandate) financial sponsorship of a public advocacy campaign on a public policy matter is about as far as you can be from a “private matter”.

[digi_owl]

Hrmf, did i get my CEOs confused. Could have sworn there was some BDSM stuff involved as well. Or was that some other FOSS project?

[octothorp3]

I'm certainly not as clever as most thieves but if you had a database of people's purchases I imagine there's some low hanging fruit if you run a query looking for people purchasing lots of valuables, with no security related purchases, and a consistent pattern of taking a vacation out of state every year.

[QAPereo]

It really depends on what's in your purchase history, where you live what, job you have, that kind of thing. I certainly wouldn't want to coming out I enjoyed a drink every now and then in Saudi Arabia, and I might want to hide my propensity to smoke cannabis from my boss. Finally there's just the notion that I might not want to be relentlessly marketed to by increasingly sophisticated algorithms, because sometimes it works and people end up buying things they wouldn't otherwise. As these techniques get better I'm sure that will continue to be a problem which only grows, and the data harvested today isn't going anywhere.