Here's a simple one that you can try at home. This isn't one of those 'the facebook app listens to me' privacy breaches, it's more concrete and provable. Take a friend you haven't talked to in a couple of years, and start chatting with them over WhatsApp. After some days of this, go to your Facebook feed and watch how their posts now appear prominently, even though they didn't before you started chatting.

This is simple and harmless, but this same information has other uses that are not so harmless. They may not be being used right now, but they may start to be used in the future

My point is specifically that these things are harmless, and everything else is purely in people's imaginations.

The problem manifests in different ways though. I'm not so concerned about obvious violations of privacy like the one you mentioned, because it's so obvious that they are wrong.

Let's say you tweet some anti-American stuff from time to time and the US government decides they want you to stop. They probably won't put a bullet in your head, but they might dig up information on you and arrest you for something totally unrelated.

This happens already. It doesn't really matter what you think of them, but people like Martin Shkreli in the US and Tommy Robinson in the UK were obviously targeted by the state because they didn't like what they were doing. They dug up information and they got them on something unrelated.

AI and tech gives governments the ability to do this to new levels. They might crash your self-driving car, or they might cause your smart-TV to catch fire while your in bed, and no one would know. We'd all carry on believing surveillance is in the interest of our safety.

Joe Nacchio [0] is a better example than Shkreli. Convicted of insider trading, allegedly in retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the NSA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Martin Shkreli wasn't targeted by the government for prosecution. Shkreli got the max sentence for a crime he committed because he was out spoken about how he was not remorseful his crimes, nor did he show any capacity to even understand the seriousness of his actions. He also encouraged others to commit crimes for him during his sentencing. Judicial discretion isn't always perfect, but enforcing the max on an obvious danger to society was the correct course of action in his case.

I'm not arguing this. My point is simply that they wouldn't have gone after him if he didn't surrounded himself in controversy. What he did happens all the time, but unlike many others his outspokenness exposed the corruption and greed which occurs daily in our economic system.

I think that really only becomes an issue in countries where there are laws passed that contradict each other and to get anything meaningful done you have to break laws and/or give bribes. At any time someone can come after you because you had to break some laws in the course of everyday business whether you wanted to or not.

> I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising.

I haven't heard of nation-state level repercussions but the persistent profiling has already bitten a few people in the ass, such as the case where Target's profiling of a teenaged girl and their subsequent marketing betrayed her pregnancy status to her parents.

Nothing bad so far... For example there's a lot of homophobic people out in the world, right? Now let's assume this article, https://osf.io/zn79k/, is correct in it's conclusions and boom, you've got machines that could potentially discriminate based on the CCTV footage of the building you entered for a job interview. This is just the start, scientists are heavily looking for those genes that make people smart, more prone to diseases, creating an AI that based on your genes determines if you're fit for high school even is seriously dystopic.

So far every single reply to my comment was about how things could go bad, without anything currently bad.

In the presence of all the tracking that people rail against, there are so few actual harms that everyone invents an issue.

I think this is telling.

I think this is telling that you don't understand what "risk" is. Do you allow random people into your home? They most likely have not done anything bad, until they do.

let me just call up the director of CIA and ask how frequently they use facial recognition technology to identify drone-strike targets in crowds.

Institutions have a long life. All the data collected today, too, will have an extremely long life. I am sure German Jews thought the census records, tax returns, synagogue membership lists, parish records that identified them as Jewish were harmless as well - until they weren't.

Suggesting that, amongst numerous possible scenarios of abuse, if there is nothing happening now then it has absolutely no potential for harm is an overwhelmingly ignorant position. Not to mention, the public would have absolutely no idea of such abuses even if they were happening.

But to actually answer your question, here is mobile malware [1] found by the lookout team that used 3 different vulnerabilities to complete compromise an iPhone all through a link opened in Safari. This allowed for applications that encrypt messages in transit, but not at rest on the device, to be compromised. Foreign governments used this malware to target investigative journalist and activists.

[1] https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegas...