[Perseids]

No no no, if you argue like this you have already chosen the wrong battleground for this debate. Your Email and meta data is not open to everyone but only to a (")trusted(") third party: to law enforcement. People (rightly) assume that the stuff that most of the people want to keep private from their peers (conflicts with their spouse, sexual orientation and kinks, financial status, health issues) isn't of interesting to the NSA data analyzer.

The real problems arise if data is put together and interpreted against your will and probably without your knowledge. Imagine an ad network that combines your location profile, your Payback data and name/address and sells that to an insurance company which decides to not have you as a customer, because your are probably overweight (drives by car, no visits to any places associated with sport, buys a lot of food). Or imagine an automated alarm that is triggered when you try to enter the country, because you travel with three coworkers from Iraq and you have written an email to your friend telling him you intend to "devastate the USA" (meaning to beat the American branch of your company in a friendly soccer game after work). You cannot rectify these misunderstandings as nobody is telling you why you now always get the special attention of the TSA or why your insurance application is denied.

This is the stuff I really dread in the current focus on big data.

A great article on the same topic: https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/12...

[rlpb]

> People (rightly) assume that the stuff that most of the people want to keep private from their peers (conflicts with their spouse, sexual orientation and kinks, financial status, health issues) isn't of interesting to the NSA data analyzer.

Are you so sure about this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...