I put all my personal data on eBay

> I found it kind of silly but worth thinking about

This was my reaction to 95% of the book. Until Radical Markets, I'd never read a nonfiction book that I found so absurd and detached from reality and yet provoked so much useful thought. I worry that others may not realize how detached it is, and that the net effect may not be positive, but we'll see.

And to think - if you didn’t have such a good memory, metaphors like this would be lost on you!

I wish he had an RSS feed.

For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you.

Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience.

Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds.

Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns.

So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people.

Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.