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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
All you can do is make your own decisions concerning your personal info and data collection. Others will do what they wish. I also think it's a bit of a mistake to assume that more people don't "really understand what is going on."
From the young(er) people I've talked to, most of them understand full well what's being done with their info. It's just not that important to them. They don't care. The convenience is worth more to them. Paradigm shifts happen all the time.
Might be good, might be bad, but I suspect it will ultimately end up somewhere in the middle like these things invariably do.
EDIT: Even being not young(er) myself, I find myself caring less and less what data mining is used for by sites I choose to engage with/utilize/do business with. When it suits me, I use the same login for multiple sites (easy for them/easy for me). When it doesn't, I create new logins. I'm not being tricked; I just don't care any more. My priorities have changed. I have a feeling there's quite a few people in that same boat.
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As your private information becomes more widely disseminated you will no longer concern yourself with the hacking of some particular company that you know you gave your information to. Why worry? The rest of the world already has the information anyway.
Yes, many people understand on a surface level that their private information isn't all that private any more. But most don't think about it beyond that. They don't think about what it may mean in the future. It's a bit like the old warning about tattoos - are you sure you want to live with that forever? ... And I'm not at all certain that the explanation is really that the convenience is worth more to them than their privacy. I think it has more to do with marketing and peer pressure and the current vogue. That companies make it difficult to retain privacy just makes it that much easier to go with the flow and scoff at the doubters.
But sure, short of various doomsday scenarios, things will sort themselves out. The hardships along the way will most likely be experienced by a quite small percentage of the people (measured against those that have benefited from the supposed advantages of the loss of privacy). In general, the world at large isn't particularly interested in the private doings of a particular individual, we're anonymous whether we want to be or not, and we take some comfort from that.
But exceptions do exist. I'm not just talking about the rich and famous, I'm talking about minor things like acrimonious divorces, arguments between neighbours, bullying at schools, and - of course - criminal use. On a percentage basis these are all minor. And none of them are new, though I expect there will be a few surprises along the way, but mostly there will just be new ways to wage old wars.
Side Note: "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter is a curious little excursion into the extreme end of loss of privacy and possible ways that society might react. (The last quarter of the book runs off with the fairies (as Baxter seems wont to do, at times), but everything before that was very well done.)