[0xbadcafebee]

> systematic, deliberate, deceptive

I'll take your word for it, the evidence doesn't look clear cut to me,

> privacy violations

Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is. Did it, or could it, do harm? This is a nearly universal standard used to assess how someone is punished according to the law.

> in order to increase profits

Of course it's to increase profits, you think they're doing it for fun? Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

[feanaro]

The point is simple, though: they cannot do it to increase profits. Doing it for profit makes it more jarring than, say, collecting extraneous personal information through an error.

Your shoe size point is simply a strawman. You've chosen one arbitrary data point in order to make the argument look less important. In any case, I'm of the opinion that neither Google nor the governments of the world should be allowed to do this kind of large scale surveillance and profiling.

And finally,

> We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is.

I agree with this completely. However if it's not just my favourite pop star, but it also contains all the articles I've read in the last two weeks, and my age, and what I've recently bought... All of these neat little data points about me, neatly filed in a profile made just for me, then the natural question that arises is: Why do you even have this? Who allowed you to start building this profile on me and on thousands of others? The systematicity and scale of it is hard to argue against.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size?

Whoever cares, cares, and it's none of your business. Noone is suggesting that you should not be allowed to allow companies to collect your shoe size and sell that information, so you are mostly just missing the point.

There are people who do not want to allow that, and there is absolutely no reason why we should force them to allow it. Claiming that what you stole is of little value does not make your theft legal. It is simply not up to you to decide what has sufficient value to keep for other people. If you take something that is someone else's property without them transferring property rights to you first, that is theft, and it is completely irrelevant whether you think that they shouldn't value what you took.

> Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

If anything, you seem to have a very confused understanding of capitalism. The one core idea of capitalism is strong individual property rights, because that is the basis for decentralized price discovery. Capitalism could not possibly work if the state simply declared that property rights for low-valued goods (based on a valuation decided by the state, presumably) a not enforceable, or if you could simply steal and use your competitor's machinery to produce goods as long as you didn't harm them (like, returned them repaired before their next production run, maybe?).

The fact that someone could make money by violating your property rights certainly never was a justification that allowed them to avoid punishment in a capitalist system.

[ben_w]

> Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is. Did it, or could it, do harm?

All personal information makes fraud and blackmail easier. Even the seemingly mundane.

I won’t go into details because the relevant law already exists.

This brings me to my second point:

> Of course it's to increase profits, you think they're doing it for fun? Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

Even in a capitalist society, doing illegal things for money is generally considered worse than doing illegal things without the expectation of getting paid.