There's plenty of reasons not to try and keep things private! It is a lot easier for comments on Lemmy, for example, to be public, rather than trying to make the discussion threads private among some set of authorized participants.

And if I am rating movies on Netflix, I really do want them to take my ratings and put them in a big machine learning pile to try and find me better movies. That's the point of rating the things.

But there's a big difference between me actually sharing information with people so they can do good, and people trying to collect information about me without my permission so that they can make money, or, worse, try to manipulate me later.

And even if the data is not in itself all that worthy of secrecy, and I might be willing to share it, someone else deciding for me that they get to follow me around and see what I am up to or what I like, without actually asking or without genuinely expecting that I might say no, is... not how consent works.

Also, some of the point of this is that one cannot in fact genuinely ignore advertisements. At the very least they constitute a cognitive load, where it is harder to do or see things because the advertisements are in the way. They can also hammer brand names and desired associations into people's heads, to ensure that most people know that e.g. X Brand Soda is the "luxury" soda. And of course in aggregate they cause people to buy things. Each person might choose to buy the thing of their own apparently free will, but running the ad will cause more people to make that decision than would otherwise.

Where they are most dangerous is when advertisements try and create problems, rather than just offering products. A sign that says "We sell Coke" is fine. Three commercials a day asking if you are guilty of "old-shoeing", the social faux pas of having old shoes, look at this man being laughed at for it, etc. are dangerous, even if they never try to sell a product.

These kinds of marketing campaigns are that much more effective if they can be targeted at the people who are the easiest to convince that made up problems are real. And while one's general personality is not exactly a secret, we also don't want scammers like this going around making lists of the particularly gullible.

In principle, anthropologically speaking, the depth and breadth of data that has been collected is at its face outstanding and valuable. The full range of human experience is documented. What can be learned if it were studied would perhaps help save the world.

Unfortunately, that "public" data is only available to the companies that harvest and buy it, not to the world at large. Not unless you are already in the shit that is collecting information on you

To echo what other people have said, any benefits of public data is immediately squashed by the heinous abuse of power that comes from not protecting privacy.

Information is freely given by those who care about the world and want to see it improve. No need to take away human rights for that.

You may have nothing to hide, but you have everything to protect.

Hypothetical: if everyone has access to your data and habits it is trivial to modify that data to frame you for nefarious activities. In other words, why the fuck would you want every rando to be searching in your underwear drawer?

Personally, its more about something being taken from me without consent and the ramifications that might have on society. And down voting you for asking this question is not conducive to a long lasting community

Imagine that someone has made a false accusation about you and it becomes part of your online profile.

Within less than a day, maybe even before you aware of the claim, every major online database has marked you as being something that you are not.

Who do you call to correct it?

Will a correction fix it?

Will the false information even get deleted?

When you don't control the data, you are always vulnerable.

I didn't authorize a random company to have access to a treasure trove of data about me so I have to lock everyone out. If data about me is being sold someone is making money off my private information. Ads can and do contain malware and consume extra data which I again never agreed to.

These are very basic arguments but I hope this helps.

Because I find it unsettling on a personal level when my wife and I, in the privacy of our home away from the world have a conversation where we make a joke about buying a banjo, and then every day for the next three weeks everywhere I go is flooded with targeted banjo ads. Verbal conversations, away from everything but our phones and computers.

Because I find it unsettling when I go to a site I have never gone to before and it greets me with my name and already knows where I live with the shipping details even though I clicked "I do not consent" on every data pop-up that I've seen in the past five years.

Because people are selling that data, my data, data about myself, and I get none of that profit and it was done without my consent or knowledge.

Because a company having my information should be something I need to personally allow, not something I need to ask and beg them not to obtain.

Because I can think of very few, if any, benevolent purposes of using that data, but there is a legion of malevolent reasons for it, and of the ones I have seen, all of them fall into this category.

All this being said, I should not need to have a reason. The onus should not rest with the individual to prove that they deserve undisturbed privacy, it should rest with the institutions that want this information; that it is a requirement to obtain this information for valid reasons and not frivolous ones, or ones rooted in greed or ideology. Like a search warrant for example.

The shift from "You have nothing to hide if you aren't doing anything illegal" to "It is illegal to criticize us. We will keep an eye on you to make sure you don't." can happen a lot faster than people want to realize.

Sometimes not even ignoring the ads is possible because they are vectors for malware as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

There's a whole set of instances in the past where someone was innocently wanting to make a little money from their website, only to have all of their users infected with malware because of it. These instances utilized newly discovered exploits to run without interaction at all. Meaning you can't simply ignore them, even just browsing a page with them was enough to infect people.

Ads aren't just annoying, but they're a vector for malware. And even if they weren't, ignoring them isn't enough to get your brain not to notice them at all. You'll always subconsciously obtain associations of brands, etc. It's literally an invasion of your brain.

https://lemmy.world/post/2338283

If the data was truly publicly available, such that anyone could make up ways to process the data and do useful things with it, then maybe that would be fine. As it is the data is locked behind paywalls - if it even is directly available at all. Businesses have collected this data for free, then they keep it to themselves and they build products and sell them for nearly pure profit. It's like they're building a car without paying for the nuts and bolts - and we provide the nuts and bolts.

Instead, ultimately the data is used against you in order to get you to buy more things. It's taken from you without your explicit consent or a reasonable exchange, and then it's used against you to your further detriment.

It's not as funny as Peace, Love and Understanding but for most of us it's all we've got left

https://www.lakeshorepublicmedia.org/npr-news/npr-news/2023-01-21/she-was-denied-entry-to-a-rockettes-show-then-the-facial-recognition-debate-ignited
This is one of many examples where privacy should really help. Another example is Google blocking account (and with it all emails, calendar, ...) of father, who sent picture of his ill daughter to doctor during pandemic.

Oh, the contempt with which people speak about their loved ones on the internet? Privacy allows that. It's really fun to watch (and provoke). I'd lose a source of entertainment.