What you say only applies to DNA.

Other types of data sets might not be globally unique, but that's also an irrelevant point if one can't be bucketed to one or more sets. And without pervasive, unregulated tracking, which is the very point of this article, it can't.

You're also too quick to declare winners. This pervasive surveillance is pretty new, society and government move slowly and it seems that our societies are starting to better understand how this new form of exploitation works. TFA is actually a cristal clear expositions of the clear disadvantages of data collection.

We still get people on HN crying "how does this affect me?" as a pro surveillance argument and the article puts that question to rest.

Depends on what you mean by won. Is your data used to make you a better consumer or prosumer?

Is data collected without your knowledge actually useful? Twitter data jumps to mind, a lot of junk.

Meaning that keeping data away from people who would use it for their own purposes, from selling you something to impounding your car if you're behind on payments cannot realistically be accompolished.

For each use, judge for yourself if that's good or bad, effective or ineffective, but the purpose doesn't change whether the data is available or not.

Bad data is bad data. It's true it gets averaged out due to the masses. Still it does provide a somewhat accurate picture, but has a degree of error.

Best means I can argue this are colleagues in plant life and marine biology using the same tools are still attempting to get concrete predictive data for the environment. It's simply not there yet.

Nope. What I'm saying is that YOU're average (and me, and everyone). Which means that given a few facts about you, the rest can be correctly inferred. Which means that you cannot prevent systems from inferring how you can, say, be induced to buy something, because you cannot keep those few trivial facts it needs for that from the system.

I keep getting ads for things I do not want to buy due to the average. For example a championship belt that recently has a tacked on women in my feed. By no means is that something that interests me but can understand the average may be tempted.

In regards to the younger generations I definitely understand the fear. But we get bored as a species, otherwise networks would never of gone down the outrage path of targeted ads had an absolute effect. And even then more and more people are setting aside their smart phones and jumping off of social media or just using it for the bare minimum.

What you are arguing is happening, but whether or not we are truly on the last leg of the data argument is not true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

That just means the algorithms don't work well enough or don't have enough data yet. Also there's a little bit of bad incentives here: these companies also get paid for showing you something at all.