If you're of the opinion that this is not problematic on a fabric-of-society level, could you please explain why?
it's important to expose this kind of mis-rationalization, especially when tiny individual harms accumulate otherwise silently to become population-level dangers (e.g., measles).
> should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet?
No, but it's hard to see how using personal data to sell ads is going to cause a harm anywhere near as bad as a person dying.
again with the misdirection. look the other way if you like, but you're letting google choose the information you access and believe (even with ads). if you don't understand the power therein, maybe you should study more of your namesake.
There's no current concrete harm, and the potential for serious harm just looks unlikely to occur.
No need for imagination, simply read history:
Like, the US once rounded up Japanese people and put them in camps. Using your same reasoning, one could argue that the government collecting any data on race/ethnicity anywhere -- like, say, on the census -- is a slippery slope to interning racial minorities again. And yet, almost nobody really cares in practice, because almost nobody thinks there's a realistic chance of that happening again.
Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
This opinion wouldn't be quite as naive if there was some magical boundary that keeps digital information solely in the hands of benevolent rulers in developed countries, but there's not.
>Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
That's somewhat like how some gun rights advocates say it's futile to ban guns because you can just kill people with knives, so why don't we ban knives too?
We're talking about virtually total information awareness which is far more powerful, problematic, and discriminate than knowledge of superficial attributes such as race and gender.
I've been using Google for a couple decades, and I can't really articulate a specific way that I've been harmed. Yes, I realize that there's the potential for harm from a leak or something like that, but it's hardly surprising that the abstract notion of possible harm isn't super compelling to the average user when they're currently getting useful services for "free".