One problem is that you don't know who's actually hoarding your data and for what purpose.

Privacy is important everywhere, people most often answer this question regarding digital privacy, but think about in your everyday life. For example, I just bought a house. Buying a house is public record here in the states. The moment you buy a house companies will grab that data and then start trying to sell you services. They will use the name of the bank that you took out a loan with, they know your loan number, loan type, loan amount, full name and address. They will do everything to misrepresent who they are as if they come from the bank that holds your loan to sign you up for some service you most likely don't want or don't need. Older people fall for it all the time. Digitally it just gets worse.

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

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.

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.

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.

https://lemmy.world/post/2338283

Edit: if you think I'm a communist because of my name username look very closely at my profile picture and tell me you think I'm serious

Did you know countries like Russia and China have better privacy protections for their citizens (at least when it comes to protections against their corporations, not their government of course), and just buy information on US citizens from US corporations for many of their human research needs?

Look at Cambridge Analyticas involvement in swinging the 2016 US election if you want an example of how much damage information can do when used in psyops

I always found the C6ISR acronym in warfare to be interesting. R is reconnaissance, S is surveillance, I is intelligence, and the 6 C's are Command and Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, and finally Combat

You can predict when conflicts are about to rise with social media information. Frustration can be measured by looking at social circles. Consider Romeo and Juliet, they like each other, but everyone around them hates everyone else in the opposing party. Because Romeo and Juliet interact with each other positively, that means groups that don't like each other are going to interact and human nature wants to resolve this frustration. This type of graph theory is used in the middle east to predict conflicts.

Do you remember the protest where BLM protesters were ran over by a truck? Russia organized the protest for both left and right wing parties. They got intelligence through surveillance. They got surveillance by just buying your info from American corps.

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.