You can't generalize from the particular to the whole because large differences in quantity add up to qualitative differences, and machine processing makes laborious correlations and connections easy to tease out.

There's similar problems with automated number plate recognition, public CCTV, non-cash transactions, etc. They all add up to massive potential privacy violations despite being fairly innocent in isolation.

Give someone your phone number, and they can't do much more than phone you. Give them a phone book, and they can phone someone given a name and address. Give them a phone book's worth of data in CSV, and they can deanonimize phone call records. Give them a list of phone numbers that have e.g. called a suicide helpline, and now they know the names and addresses of people who are likely to kill themselves. Without machine processing (i.e. with a book rather than CSV), this would be difficult; without people sharing the relatively innocuous detail of their phone number, it wouldn't be possible (leaving social engineering aside).