What I think is really interesting about this conversation is the
total lack of conversation. Any and all data collection is either completely harmless (from the corporate narrative) or the end of all liberty and privacy (from the EFF narrative and their leech-like tech rag clickbait headlines, sup techcrunch, you're still the problem!).
There is no concept of even discussing that this might be a tradeoff or a shift in what is perceived as private. There is no consideration given to how we might still do these things that people want while protecting their data. There's no consideration for how people's lives are changed in different ways by this tech.
Nope. It's either a total gain or a total loss.
And that is the real problem here. People are applying their political bad habits to what should be a reasonable and sensitive discussion about the varying levels of tradeoffs we should be willing to give and what the net good we can extract from this technology.
A great example is street view. Street view ultimately has enabled extremely detailed and powerful navigation, complete with a ton of ways to do real time traffic detection. Most people using apps that benefit from this data would say that's a net good, and in general as the tech evolves and traffic distributes more efficiently then urban environments see a similar positive effect.
Of course, the tradeoff is that I can scan a snapshot of your street and if you were there playing football with your kid, walking your dog, or publicly exposing yourself then minus your face I'm going to be able to see all that.
What makes these kind of issues even less clear is that street view enables self-driving car technology (we need the detailed and constantly updated nav systems for them). Self-driving car technology has the potential to totally transform some neighborhoods, has massive potential for assisting disabled people, can completely change the way we ship goods and thusly preserve oil and energy resources for generations to come. But it also has the potential to be a new way for the upper and rich classes of the world to completely cut out service industries and further alienate the economic middle and lower classes.
Why is this meaningful? Because if we don't talk about them then we can't help shape them. If we understand the implications as a society and demand commensurate good from these private industries then it can be an incredible boon to our societies. If we don't, then one of these extremist sides will win and all options for a middle ground where we get benefits and have tradeoffs will be excluded.
That's a terrible outcome.