[astro_robot]

Honest question. I'm unsure what the danger is in letting these companies acquire data on us. We get a lot of benefit from using their products for free. Why should I care about giving my data to them as a cost of admission?

[metalliqaz]

The aggregation of data is extensive and the ubiquity of the net means the data covers nearly every aspect of your life. Such information can be misused in many ways. Unfortunately, those misuses don't really become clear until the data set is already built, so there is no way to undo it. Even if Facebook or Google don't exploit the data themselves, the data could be stolen by criminals or seized by the government.

Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay up?

Is that worth the price free access to your high-school friends' duckface selfies?

[dsfyu404ed]

>Are there personal things in your past you don't want your insurance company to know about? How about your employer? Or the IRS? Even your spouse? What if someone showed up one day and threatened to your your secrets unless you pay up?

Once tabloid journalists start trying to infer embarrassing things about politicians based on metadata we'll probably have some progress.

[rahoulb]

Watch Minority Report, then replace "psychics" with "data-mining"

[alasdair_]

>Honest question. I'm unsure what the danger is in letting these companies acquire data on us. We get a lot of benefit from using their products for free. Why should I care about giving my data to them as a cost of admission?

Trivial example: Let's say sometime in the future you plan on running for political office, or you become a journalist writing a story on someone powerful or otherwise become someone who powerful people would like to discredit. Having a log of everything you've ever done online would be very useful in causing you a whole bunch of problems.

[programmarchy]

Perhaps you don't have any controversial opinions or beliefs. However, that could change. Not because you change your views, but because in the future a power could arise that wants to kill people who believe the things you do, and has no problem using force to acquire the data from Google to make their lists. Suddenly, you have a problem.