[hanshan]

>The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is.

You forgot about the elephant in the room: the imminent danger of cyberwarfare.

The reason the Holocaust was so efficient at mass murder was because of "giving up your personal data".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

These tech companies have aggregated the most detailed demographical and psychological profiles in history on billions of people.

Let's not pretend they're impervious to hackers.

The "weapons of mass destruction" of the future will be algorithms loaded with the dual-use munitions we call "big data".

[fjsolwmv]

Holocaust only needed personal data because of the weird racism. You don't need personal data if you want to just invent "communist" or "counter-revolutionary" victims to persecute or to murder everyone with a different nose shape from the group in power.