Can you say that with any certainty? You don't know what you can do with data really until you have it all available at your disposal.

Yes, I can say that with certainty. Anything a credit card company will do when they have access to aggregate data is done to benefit the credit card company, not the customers. And anything healthcare providers can do when it comes to making diagnoses is either on an individual basis, in which case access to my social media data would not matter or it is part of a study in which case there should be proper controls.

If you wish to argue that there are direct benefits to consumers from either giving credit card companies or health care providers access to your social media data then the the onus is on you to prove this.

The onus isn't on me to prove anything. The OP was against harvesting of data in all forms, not just social media.

That means no credit, insurance, or health related data collection of any kind at all.

What do you think of that?

That's not how I read OP's comment. I interpreted it as people should not be aggregating data to make decisions about you without your informed consent. Credit companies should be using only the data I provide them in questionnaire form to make decisions; health insurers should only be using my health record to make decisions. They should not be using my social media profile, purchasing history, location data, conversations, pictures, associations etc which I agree with.

Your thesis is that without credit, insurance or health data collection those entities will not be able to function.

The world is a lot larger than just the United States and in other places banks, insurance companies and healthcare providers function just fine even if they do not have the data gathering capabilities that are considered 'normal' in the United States.

So there's what I think of 'that', data collection is not a pre-requisite for any of this.

Easy access to credit the way it runs in the US isn't universal, and most places it is are currently dealing with the same data collection issues.

Partitioning the data and more heavily regulating the credit industry may be part of a solution.

Where do healthcare providers function well with less data than those in the US? I'm not experienced enough with the healthcare industry and nationalization of healthcare data to know, so if you have examples I'd really appreciate it.

The US is about as bad as it gets when it comes to healthcare. Good examples for healthcare run in a way that it does not break the bank and provides a high level of care are Canada and France, other Western European countries to greater or lesser degree depending on how much privatization has been going on.

Sure, as far as money is concerned - what about data collection and management, though? Isn't that what we were talking about?

The credit, insurance, and health industries predate data harvesting by 1000s of years.

Seems to me like we're where we are now precisely becuase we've learned what can be done with all that data, and we don't like it.

Your whole argument is based on a misdirected premise anyway. In fact credit reporting and health care are very heavily regulated industries in terms of how that data is stored and what can be done with it. Facebook saw no such regulation, and look where we are.

Yes. Banks and insurance were around long before Facebook, like by 1000 years. I can’t tell if you’re being serious or putting us on.