[spiderfarmer]

  You sell the "abuse" as defense for a shocking crime.

This works the other way around too. You use the abuse of non-personally identifiable information (by combining it with other data points, illegal without consent in the EU) to take useful data away from innocent webmasters.

[JohnFen]

> to take useful data away from innocent webmasters.

Webmasters who are collecting data about me or my machines (excluding the data about my direct use of their site) without my permission are not "innocent webmasters".

[close04]

I'm surprised that in 2019 people (especially on HN) still believe/claim that users trying to hang on to their personal data "abuse" this to "take useful data away from innocent webmasters".

There are dozens of real life situations where covertly collecting such data would be considered completely unacceptable and yet my comment arguing this was still substantially downvoted.

But I guess my point is being in a technically literate community makes no difference when it comes to making a buck. Once one agrees to take a "not an outrageous amount" of private data for a bit of money, they'll agree to take an outrageous amount for outrageous money. And I think this is a perfectly accurate explanation for what FB, Google, [you name it] are doing.

[close04]

Doesn't your argument work against encryption just the same? With such an argument aren't you actually punishing 99.9% of the internet population for what the 0.1% is doing?