We at the Dope are a contrarian bunch, which I like on the whole. It leads to good debate and sometimes changing of minds. But it also means that whatever stand one takes, there’s probably going to be pushback. If I had started a thread saying “Everything is great with goods and services these days, prove me wrong”, I have no doubt we’d have a lot of people trying to do so with all kinds of horror stories.
So I’m going to be contrarian here and assert:
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Even if I were to list ways in which I have been personally harmed by data collection, people would counter (correctly) that I’m just one person and anectdote doesn’t equal data.
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I’m comfortable taking it as a given that data harvesting is a bad thing, at least the way it’s being done in the U.S. One cite is the recent thread, Is your car’s computer spying on you?. The first post covers a lot of it, and then there’s this link at the bottom.
I think you’re giving businesses an awful lot of benefit of the doubt by assuming they are using our data merely to improve goods and services. If a thread were started with that assumption I’m guessing we’d have a pretty lively debate.