As far as I can see, there are many good uses of this data (some potentially profitable, such as selling to health insurance companies so they can better price their products and evaluate risks) and very few bad uses of this data.
Can someone please clarify for me exactly what the potential harm is here... using evidence and reason instead of conjecture and belief? Because until then, this all smells an awful lot like a conspiracy theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Here's an example: Google has had our data for literally decades now. What is the measurable, significant harm that has resulted? And if there is nothing, what catastrophes are yet possible where a single or group of rogue bad actors profit off the suffering of many and get away with it?
Please explain to me my naiveté here.
You can do something like k-anonymizing the data and then destroying the original, personally identifiable data. But k-anonymity has its limits, too.
Every other strategy I know of assumes that it's OK to keep a private copy of the original data, which works well if we're talking about scenario such as a source that needs to keep the raw data (like a health care provider) providing the data with a semi-trustworthy external party such as a health researcher. But it doesn't address what I'm guessing is the main concern here, which is that, even if you accept for the sake of argument that Google currently has no intention to do gross things with the data, they can't make any promises that will hold indefinitely. It's a long-lived organization that whose policies might change with any change in leadership, market, or even political conditions, so any promises they might make are simply meaningless in the long run. As they would be with any organization, regardless of the presence or absence of any present-day warm fuzzy feelings.
https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...
In the age of Big Data, there's only one way for data to be anonymized -- it needs to be aggregated with all the other data, and the original individual data records need to be deleted.
This, to me anyway, is lifeblood American identity stuff.
You might say "well congrats on your private liberty but youre sharing it right here for all companies to scoop up". But that's exactly that problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/fitbit-murder-arrest.h...
There is nearly zero incentive to actually your anonymize data, and anonymization doesn't make you anonymous.
This is a lesson we should have learned more than a decade ago[1], when AOL released their anonymized search data for research purposes, and thousands of people were trivially identified using it.
How anonymised is it again?
If the people were given anonymous data that showed that 100% of the 2008 bankers were going on a cruise departing tomorrow, we could easily fix things. Well, that's what _they're_ doing to us.
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565&
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/im-be...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-even-law-abidi...
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-i...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/surveillance-you-may-have-nothing...
https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-is-innately-flawed-not...
https://mashable.com/2013/06/13/julian-sanchez-nsa/
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-nothing-to...
Also, since you mention anonymization, many people have demonstrated how trivial it is to de-anonymize "anonymized data" particularly if you have access to multiple data sets
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf
http://palms.princeton.edu/system/files/Quantification+of+De...
http://www.yongyeol.com/papers/nilizadeh-deanon-2014.pdf
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dkxyw/tracking-people-on...
https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.htm...
You're arguing something different. I'm arguing that a sufficiently anonymized version of my data is not demonstrably harmful. You're arguing that privacy in general is important, which I would not dispute.
