The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.
Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
> has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence
I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
> The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe.
There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
You are correct, and if that were the end of it, people like myself who are concerned about it could rightly be labeled paranoid.
However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates,
your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc.
And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates.
An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever.
While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details.
You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
>model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
> To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
This is a true statement that doesn't address any of the arguments; a non-sequitur. Yes, computers are better at remembering and interpreting (some) data than humans.
What does that have to do with the humans who access and use that data for their own, very human ends? You skipped that part.
When I have the stomach for it, I click irrelevant ads which don’t reflect my interests. You know—out of curiosity—to spend their money. It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
Like if I click an ad for, say, hunting gear… I’m instantly inundated with “thin blue line” and not very subtly threatening “guns rights” stuff and pretty much every single thing I would expect to see in a far right mob.
Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.