Remember; there's no such thing as "anonymized data", there's only "not enough other data to correlate out identities from it".
I am saying is that these benign things are opt-out not because most people wouldn't want to do them if they weigh the prons and cons but because they don't want to put in the effort of doing so and will just be conservative - which is logical from an individual perspective - but will cause us to lose out on opportunities as a whole.
Also this data is getting collected weather you want it or not, even intelligence people are just taping over their webcams as a security measure - the attitude that we must protect every bit of privacy by default will lead to the future where hidden data collection is the only way to access data - people will be making money off it, it won't be available to general public (for eg. public research) and there will be no transparency about it. And if you think the government will protect you - well they are the biggest transgressor here.
So instead of fighting a lost battle with trying to keep absolute privacy why not just make most of that data public and available and focus on protecting the really sensitive stuff.
Because you can't. You cannot build something that protects the really sensitive stuff out of stuff that's leaking data left and right, making it harder and harder to protect the really sensitive stuff.
Yeah, carrier contracts also "disclose" everything, there's a reason why it's called "small print".
It would only take to make it opt-in, instead of opt-out to rectify this.
For example your wearables get to collect so much biometric info, if that data can be connected to detecting conditions early it would provide a lot of value down the road. At some point we will have the option to collect data about what you ate, what you did, where you went and then how that affected your biometrics, and we can inexpensively collect huge scale DNA samples, etc. all that data if available publicly could really provide insights in to things that are really not practical in limited group studies.
For reasons such as this I think I'm fine if services collect anonymized (unless we solve identity theft and such security concerns) information about me, I'd just want them to make this data free.