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.