However, the ultimate goal of this technology is to uniquely identify you for the sake of personalization, tracking, etc. There's an implicit grant being invoked that if anonymized properly or if certain measures are taken, then the privacy breach is ok.
I'm reminded of some culture I heard of once that refused to have photographs taken of themselves out of fear that it would steal their souls.
Any case where data is harvested via observations of you in which that data that represents you is not controlled by you or you are not aware of, seems like a breach of privacy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm not defeatist, I believe we have the power to change things. But, I'm also saying, I'm not sure, for a variety of reasons, we'll ever be able to rollback the concept of pervasive survellaince because, it is starting to become part of technological advancement - for our technology to recognize and work with us better, it must observe us. So long as that is the case, that ability can be abused unless it is protected, and, as security experts like Bruce Schneier have said, there is no such thing as absolute security, only security that lasts for a certain period of time [1].
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychol...
You are right though, we do have some control for ourselves and our families and we do have rights and responsibilities to protect that. And we can be pragmatic about that. To those things I cannot disagree and it is our responsibility as responsible adults to do that.
For myself, I'm cool with a lot of that. My partner will have to decide for herself. Though it might affect me since we live together and have a child. We're adults though. Our child, however, is our responsibility and if I can protect her privacy in cases which are likely to backfire later on, I should, IMO. Don't get me wrong: I don't have the illusion I'll be able to protect her in every case in this regard but I believe this to be one of those examples. Another one is where your child did something stupid (such as breaking the law) and you documented it. Don't shame your child in public!
What's going to happen is that there will be documented cases of what children did in their youth which were not acceptable. But because roughly all children have that, its kinda OK. "We all were young" will have public sources to back it up, if they're searched for.
However not doing anything is a defeatist approach to the problem IMO. In that light, I find your post defeatist itself; instead of being open minded about this I suggest being pragmatic; a slightly different angle, also less extreme one way or the other. We still have some privacy left. You can, for example, wilfully leave your smartphone home as Bruce Schneier wrote in his latest book Data and Goliath. We have that choice. His essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? [1] also covers this very topic. Because that also covers how others should treat your private data, something the EU is far ahead on with privacy laws, right to be forgotten, GDPR, accountability on losing private data, etc compared to the USA.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...