[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.